Vincent Routhier is a conceptual artist whose interdisciplinary practice finds its bases in philosophical thinking and a science-based approach. His work comprises a methodological and empirical study that engages with the different structural aspects of the idea of quantity. By approaching art as a pedagogical tool, he has developed since 2013 a handmade generative practice which allows the activation of mathematical concepts into geometrical drawings. Taking up the notion of the system in its truly physical sense, Routhier focuses specifically on the possibility of deploying this practice in different dimensions, be they digital or material.

Vincent Routhier lives and works in Montreal. He has completed an MFA in Intermedia/Cyber Art at Concordia University. His work has been presented in many galleries and art venues in Canada and North America, including the Hellen Day Art Center, Galerie B-312, the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Galerie Simon Blais, Molinari Foundation and La Galerie l’Œuvre de l’Autre. He is the recipient of the 2016 Sylvie and Simon Blais Award for Emerging Visual Artists. He also holds the first world record for the greatest number of duplications of the square applied to a sheet of paper.

About the handmade generative practice:

It is by using a shape cut directly from a sheet of paper as a stencil and by folding the paper several times that the drawing is developed. There is a fold for each printed shape. The direction taken by the template determines the shape and the pattern that compose the drawing.

The drawing is its own tool and its own plan: it can be potentially activated in all the possible ways contained in its own creative system. Those are for Routhier the principal characteristics that compose generative art. In a manner of speaking, he just wants to say that in between things there is nothing and from this nothing emanate the things.