Augustin Rioux

Augustin Rioux, a Québécois artist, develops a practice that combines photography, installation, sculpture, painting, and the moving image. His work is concerned with the conditions under which an image appears, its materiality, and its relations to memory, absence, and the gaze.

His path was first shaped in the performing arts, notably through scenography and directing, as well as in film editing. These experiences have left a lasting mark on his approach to the visual arts: the image is rarely considered in isolation, but in its relations to space, time, the presence of bodies, and the position of the viewer.

This experience of space, editing, and visual construction extends today into a practice in which the formal means are determined by the needs specific to each project. Particular attention is paid to making, materials, surfaces, and modes of presentation, as much as to the capacity of images to produce associations and to make certain forms persist in memory.

References to the history of painting and photography meet contemporary techniques and visual behaviors. These different temporalities are less references to be reconciled than a working space where gaps, ambiguities, and resonances can remain. This research as a whole finds its framework in Les fleurs de l'œil, a long-term project that brings together Augustin Rioux's work.

This dynamic rests less on continuity than on resonance. The works are neither fragments of a general narrative nor stages in a predetermined program. They form a network of mobile correspondences in which connections, gaps, and reappearances gradually produce new meanings. What is added thus transforms the whole as much as it is itself inflected by what precedes it.

Rioux’s work also sets in tension visual regimes belonging to different temporalities. References drawn from the history of painting can stand alongside contemporary uses of the photographic image, while reproduction processes can be reinvested in singular, material forms. The aim is not to produce a synthesis of these registers, but to maintain their gaps, survivals, and frictions.

Les fleurs de l'œil thus tends toward no definitive form. Its openness is less a horizon to be reached than its very mode of development: the project becomes more precise and transforms as it expands.

The whole of Augustin Rioux's visual work belongs to a single overarching work, Les fleurs de l'œil, conceived as a territory of creation in constant expansion.

Les fleurs de l'œil is built as an open body of work, made up of autonomous works and projects whose relations are redefined as they appear. Photography, painting, sculpture, and installation take part in a shared inquiry into the forms of presence of the image, its transformations, and the relations it establishes with the gaze.

The approach proceeds through shifts, reprises, and relations. An image, a motif, or a structure can migrate from one work to another, change status, medium, or scale, and thereby acquire new functions. These movements never abolish the autonomy of the works: each has its own regime, temporality, and coherence. The body of work develops according to a logic of constellation, in which each new element retroactively reconfigures the relations already established and shifts how they are read.