Evolving out of Op and Pop into New Media, Paul Emile Rioux is evolving his own particular style of art. From pop symbols, labels and identity markers, and using the latest digital technology, Rioux reminds us that the language of art has moved further along from its early beginnings in the 1970s. What was once a fixed image can now be manipulated and transformed within the matrix of the computer screen. Pixels can be expanded until they attain their own beautiful tenor. What pop was, and what op was, become a new hybrid artform. Shape, colour, flux, flow, with a fluid in-matrix non-object-based language, develop. This new media application of otherwise natural symbols reminds us of the links between primitivism and pop culture, and how unconscious and deeply rooted such features as the tendency to organize shapes, to develop symbols with a hieratic meaning and to read into the ordinary a deeper meaning... We are reminded of Vasarely, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, but Rioux makes no attempt to copy or imitate. The op pop is a pretext to play on and with form, colour and context per se.A simple Barilla pasta box image of a wheat chaff becomes the jumping off point to develop a series of images to do with the tragedy of 9/11. The pixels are aggrandized so much they resemble buildings, skyscrapers, and we look at the structures within the structure. Rioux’s first exhibition originated out of the Andy Warhol soup-can image. What originally was an ironic, even tongue-in-cheek play on and with art and commercial symbols for Warhol becomes a more surreal, hypertropic experience when Rioux first exhibited these works at TM Gallery. After successive experimentations, a second show called Jell-O saw Rioux evolving this use of pixels and manipulation of the image into an abstract language of expression. The brand aspect of Jell-O gelatin, subtly transformed, became bio-form, an anachronism, even ironic given the initial commercial intentions of Madison Avenue’s packaging experts. The language of art thus has been taken further in a new media.
Yet another exhibit featured Heinz imagery. The way these images are manipulated is so beautiful that it evolves into a kind of new primitivism. We are reminded of the links between Mickey Mouse’s ears and the Venus of Willendorf, something Walt Disney was undoubtedly aware of. What is sacred in art is the way images develop their own iconic status. Rioux has evolved a meaning simply by rephrasing objects and icons of the everyday. He does this by accessing what is ordinary and rendering it in an extraordinary way, into a unique status. These images can involve movement or stasis, a kaleidoscopic effect, but above all they involve a search that expresses a new language, where old standards are rephrased into a novel new-technology idiom. Some images morph, while others build strata and formal sequences. Other images are akin to painting with pixels, and evolve during the process. These works have captured the pop and op idiom and transformed it from graphic commercial commentary into a new, more exploratory level of experience. Paul Emile Rioux is well-versed in the language of commercial visual culture, and begins with the initial form, icon and phraseology of the pop-world icon but he offers an equally formidable break with the pop language, as if what he reveals likewise reduces, removes or rephrases. It all seems to awaken a spiritual significance that uses the cadence of a commercial language. This irony is also as contemporary as contemporary can be. Whether a bar code or a label or simply the form of an object, each element is stretched, distended, taken out of its original form, to build into a new form. Form out of form uses the new technology...(extrait)

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