Etienne Salomé

b500 magazine

Yacht & Supercar Designer / Artist

After working for 12 years on the design of Bugatti Automobiles, Berlin-based Etienne Salomé decided to create his own company: ‘Salome Yachts and Design’, He officially launched with his team the ‘Atlantic Project’ in September 2019 during the Monaco Yacht Show, a 12 meter sport tender, immediately recognisable on the water, a true head-turner. He keeps one foot in the automotive industry as a consultant for various car manufacturers including the supercar/ hypercar manufacturer Koenigsegg. I cannot deny that I love speed, not always for its own sake but for being in control of it. There is a huge responsibility and it requires concentration and respect. My latest art works embody the fact that exercised with care and precision driving is hugely rewarding. For me the detail in the car that connect the man to the machine are the instruments.

So for my Porsche artwork “70 years Man Machine”, I collected as many photos of Porsche tachometers as possible through my travels, exhibition, car fairs, concours, and created an art work using those images. The final piece is a 100x100cm lambda print mounted under 4mm plexiglass on a 3mm aluminium di-bond, an edition of 70 numbered examples, hand signed and dated by myself.

This piece of art is using 35 selected iconic Porsche tachometers, all compressed into one single image that can be looked at in one moment. It draws you visually and gets you trying to figure out how these visual traces in the result relate to the source material. I like the way that the source material is my own photography, and that I create visually interesting but semi-abstract imagery by means of a very clearly defined process. For the “70 years Man Machine”, the integration from multiple speedometers selected all through the years of production of the brand, provides the third parameter in the realisation of these two-dimensional photographic objects, time! Through this process of creation, we can clearly see the consistency of the design created at Weissach, the font, colours, concentric circles... 70 years of perfection. Interestingly there is no need for a brand logo in order to recognise the brand, even in the details, Porsche is immediately recognisable.

I have also created this style of artwork for an exhibition in Paris, pre-lockdown when exhibitions were still possible! For those pieces I used some tachometers or speedometers from other brands too: Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bugatti, Maserati, Rolls Royce, Bentley or Alfa Romeo and printed them in 200x200 cm. The accompanying video to this article is a great memory of the exhibition!