Jacques Palumbo

Jacques Palumbo was born in Philippeville, Algeria, in 1939. He studied at the National School of Architecture and Fine Arts in Algiers before continuing his training in Paris, where he earned an advanced diploma in drawing and visual arts from the Institute of Art and Archaeology in 1964. After a short period teaching drawing in France, he moved to Montreal in 1965 and began working independently as a painter and sculptor. His career unfolded across distinct periods, from figurative and organic painting to the early use of computers for visual composition in the 1970s. Later in life, he also turned to writing, using fiction to process his experience of displacement after leaving Algeria and to reflect on the broader exile of the Pied-Noir community. His novels revisit questions of belonging and the search for continuity across places and identities.

Palumbo approached art as a form of research, using visual language to test ideas about order, perception, and change. He explored these ideas by developing rule-based processes that generated visual variation within carefully defined limits. Using mathematical sequences, color equivalences, and programmed instructions, he created works that revealed how small shifts in parameters could produce complex visual outcomes. This method allowed him to study perception as an active experience, observing how the eye responds to pattern, balance, and movement, while maintaining a precise and almost scientific approach to visual form. In the early 1970s he began working with computers at the University of Montreal’s computing center, translating coded instructions into images that unfolded through calculation rather than gesture. Using a CDC 6400 mainframe and a Versatec electrostatic plotter, he produced works that treated programming as a visual process and the algorithm as a tool for composition. These experiments placed him among the first artists in Canada to use digital technology creatively, extending his exploration of form into animation, film, and other time-based works that linked art, science, and technology. 

His work was widely exhibited in Canada and abroad. His participation in major international exhibits - from Cybernetic Art Trip in Tokyo and Art and Computer in Paris to Les Images du Futur in Montreal - positioned him at the forefront of computer-based art in the 1970s and 1980s. He was recognized by both Canadian and international institutions, receiving multiple grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Quebec Ministry of Cultural Affairs, as well as awards for printmaking and computer animation. His works entered the collections of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Palumbo passed away in 2018