The Samuel Rousseau exhibition is the materialization of an experimental project hitherto unseen, on the theme relating to urbanism, the city and the flow of the masses that animate it. To do so, the artist has employed a series of videoprojections and LCD panels. The ensemble is mixed with elevated constructions, wood pallets or Parisian metro tiling, integrating the silhouettes of the visiting audience.

 Extract of an interview between Frédéric Bouglé and Samuel Rousseau
 June, 2011

• The installations, on the two levels of the 500 m² Arts Center, for the most part being shown for the first time, will inaugurate the Samuel Rousseau exhibit, the gifted video magician. On the ground floor, a magistral palettised construction, an animated theater of colored silhouettes carries the visitor across the stage that swerves into a backstage of makeshift decor. Aren’t we all at some point in our lives, actor or spectator, in the street or out of our windows, picture eaters and consumers of images, Samuel Beckett’s prowling bodies seen and peeking through the slats of the screen board architecture.

FRÉDÉRIC BOUGLÉ :

• Each new video creation, like Un monde-machine mis en abîme [A Machine World in a Machine World...], anticipates one step more an irrevocable future world. Under the image of the kaleidoscopic Rotorelief, the piece relates an exclusive universe of which the material production validates the unique human finality. The entire world, become a single giant city, is an industrial complex in perpetual movement of mechanized gyration. Its condition like cylinders positioned in the hoop of an old airplane engine, drive a rectilinear alternative movement of architectonic pistons, to the rhythm of a visual and sonic cycle. Skyscrapers and factories stretch and curl, rise and fall on a regular tempo. Factory smokestacks puff out white and colored clouds, as if in the background an invisible entity was relentlessly playing a brick bagpipe, justifying, if needed, the activity of the system. Neither little men nor moving shadows to go to work or to live in the machine. What comes of it is a simple looped narration, disconcerting absurd and absorbing enough, and sufficient to the human mind to validate the whole mechanism. The fact is that social existence, public interest, answer the economic urgency and its techniques. This urban and architectural mobile has no other motive than working itself : no universal incantation for a new era, no prayer for a more sensitive tone of existence, no common immaterial aspiration. This is the principle, it is obsessing and fascinating. Does an internal combustion engine look for the meaning of its rotation ? Cornered between the pressure to produce hardly enough to meet demands and the curly smoke of exhaust, why would this world machine want to reproduce itself another way ? Spinning in its own void, the piece emanates a mysterious poetry of its swirling strength.

SAMUEL ROUSSEAU :

• Formally also, I am questioning timeout within loops in time. Because I need to have my video work exactly like a sculpture or a painting, and that it only be a detonator of reality. So even when I make a narration, this narration will be in cycle and nonstop, so that one can come at any point and just be in a temporal correctness. Then, inevitably it has an hypnotic force. I make continuous loops, and I make invisible loops, that is to say sometimes I make 40 seconds and the people watch them for 10 minutes. It’s pretty incredible, but there’s always something to see. If you look at “Plastikcity”, I make them using temporal multi-loops. We will come back to the “Chemical house”, for me it is music. I’m a DJ, I have organized raves, so my culture is part of this range. With “Plastikcity” I do this : I take a 20 second loop and then another one and another one which gives me 60 seconds. And so I can make a 60 second loop in my 20 seconds. That means that within the time that my three actions take place, I will take a loop of 60 seconds out of my 20 seconds. But right in the middle, I will do another one that will make another 60 seconds, that I will chop in half and put on the beginning. What’s more, I will take a 40 second one that I will cut, that I’ll make 20 seconds, that I will then cut to 60 seconds, and so on and so forth. And so you’ve got a loop that goes into a loop that goes again into another loop, and then makes another big new loop . . .

 Curator of the exhibition : Frédéric Bouglé

 with the support of >

la fondation Claudine et Jean-Marc Salomon, la Galerie Aéroplastics à Bruxelles, la Galerie Claire Gastaud à Clermont-Ferrand et de André Siegel.

 partners >

Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication/Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles d’Auvergne, Ville de Thiers, Conseil Général du Puy-de-Dôme, Clermont Communauté, Conseil Régional d’Auvergne, Rectorat de l’Académie de Clermont-Ferrand, Parc Naturel Régional du Livradois-Forez.

www.samuelrousseau.com