Etienne Salomé's adrenaline art
Frenchman Etienne Salomé is the head of interior design at Bugatti, and an artist. His artwork is about speed, and how to control it. Born in Paris, speed has always given Salomé a thrill, ever since his father first took him to the 24 Hours of Le Mans, aged 12.
He went on to study industrial design in Paris and then later at the Royal College of Art in London. Today Salomé transforms some of his automotive experiences into the art that you can see here. The examples featured above start with a modern piece of chronophotography – essentially, a technique used in the late nineteenth century to conjure movement from a series of snapshots. Salomé selected a subject for this piece that makes speed tangible: thirty-five different Porsche rev counter from seventy years of the company’s history.
He photographed many of them, as well as the rims, in the Porsche Museum in Zuffenhausen. He then superimposed the images on a 2 metre square surface so they merge into a single instrument, which provides a diffuse idea of the scales but more closely resembles an abstract painting. ‘Superpositioning crystallizes speed and time into a single instant,’ he explains. And his ‘adrenaline art,’ as he calls it, is gaining recognition.
Salomé’s latest work also deals with Porsche. It’s another piece of chronophotography, for which he selected twenty-five different rims. From the simple, flat wheel cover of the early 356 to the high-tech design of later models, the rims represent nearly seventy-five years of Porsche design history. The superimposed images generate a holographic effect as well. They create the impression of wheels in rapid motion, which is precisely the subject of Salomé’s work.
Source: Christophorus, No. 390 by Jan van Rossem and photographed by Oliver Zupancic.