‍Publication co-published by Centre Bang, Éditions OQP and Centre SAGAMIE

The world as it appears to us in its daily scroll takes on a diversity of forms and modalities. What constitutes it in its micro-detail escapes us, and what makes it larger than life is beyond us. What it really and entirely is will never be more than a partial hypothesis. Nevertheless, the digital age of which we are a part now presents us with its own perspective: that of information. Everything that exists can become information. It is the world's becoming data with which we must now come to terms. This becoming data is at the heart of Paolo Almario's work.

Part of a generation of artists for whom the digital is, so to speak, "natural", Almario traces the contours of a practice in which reality is redoubled in binary mode and articulated around perspectives that decompose-recompose its complexity. Works from the -formed (2013-) series are emblematic of this approach. Initially created in reaction to the imprisonment of the artist's father in Colombia - following false accusations linked to his political and ideological stance - the four installations in this series are made up of portraits whose analogous pixelation decomposes over time. "Automated, ephemeral, evolving and self-destructive" - as the artist puts it - these images carry within them all the consistency of reality as we recognize it, and can be read as amalgams of fragments that betray their composite nature. With the works in the -formé series, we are in a "pre-data" digital logic, where the premises of a work such as Datasets : Lumière: Chicoutimi (2018).