Vortex (2008)
In Vortex, three stacked car tires act as support for a video of a parade of cars caught up in a tornado, in an endless whirling motion. The view of a myriad of cars endlessly going around in a circle epitomises to perfection our feelings towards the incessant traffic in certain areas or roads. Samuel Rousseau likes to play with the spectator’s feelings to build new sensations in the face of well-known situations. That is the case of Vortex: the poetic and sensorial rendering of a daily and inexhaustible reality such as traffic. The scale reduction of cars to the size of a toy, the humour implicit in the feeling that, more than inside a tornado, the cars are being sucked down the drain, and the optical illusion of the circular movement, offer a further twist of the screw to everyday reality, taking it to the realm of irony and illusion. Thus, such a given reality as traffic and its underlying nature may be at once seen as absurd, poetic or excessive.
