Scanlines

Born in Béziers, France, Paul Loubet trained in Belgium, after which he spent five years in Buenos Aires devoted to painting and muralism. His multidisciplinary practice—across painting, sculpture, installation, edition and sound—has moved from large canvases steeped in pop culture and urban landscapes towards a more minimal vocabulary built around primitive video games, digital cartography and vintage electronic artefacts. He calls this aesthetic “lo-fi sci-fi”. Drawn to popular and outsider arts, his work explores how systems—particularly those of video games—shape our understanding of power, history and conflict. For the Urban Art Biennale 2026, Loubet presents the site-specific intervention Scanlines. The title refers to the horizontal scanning of a cathode-ray tube, the scan lines that once gave video monitors their characteristic striated glow. Loubet transposes a primitive digital perspective inspired by the 1981 arcade game Turbo and sets it against the architecture of the Ironworks, confronting the industrial heritage of the site with the digital geometry of early computer-generated visuals.