You know this place. You've been here once, twice... a hundred times before. You know it without recognizing it. You don't recognize it because it doesn't exist. It's a fusion of a thousand similar places; school corridors, offices, administrative buildings, hospitals, court rooms... Above all else it is the corridor that you walked down in the night when, with closed eyes, you drifted aimlessly in this deserted place, without ever finding a way out of your entranced wanderings. Your eyes roam around this familiar, intermediary place and discover a vanishing point, an exit on the left, but it turns out to be a closed loop. There is no exit; you are in a labyrinth. There is no escape from this loop of space and time. Will you dare open one of the doors of this mysterious administrative building?

[...] As you approach one of them you lose your balance. The feeling of vertigo that grips you is real – a section of the floor has collapsed under your feet. You hadn't noticed that the white tiles were actually abysses. The familiarity of the surroundings meant that your vision had only selected a few of the elements necessary to comprehend the space around you.
Your visual imagination had then automatically completed the scene, making you fall into an optical illusion. Now you feel reassured by the fact that this must be a dream. This situation cannot be real; this checkered board reminds you of a game of chess. There is no possibility of escape. You are trapped on the board - but are you a pawn, a knight or a king ?

[...] Johan Parent's 'Laboratoire Vertigo' drawings refer explicitly to the real world in order to introduce a disturbing element - a floor with an impossible pattern. The process of 'strangifying' objects involves complicating shape and form and thereby increasing the difficulty and the duration of perception. This misappropriation of a familiar object allows Johan Parent to restore the initial strangeness of a place which, over time, had become routine.
The illusion that is 'Laboratoire Vertigo' can be revealed; the floor of this perfectly credible public place is incomplete. Either the body loses its balance, obeying the law of gravity and leading inexorably to a fall, one of humankind's primal fears which awakens dreamers with a start, or the body maintains its dream-like consistency and floats to the surface like a spirit. Events - so radically different from objects - are not sought for deep down, but rather on the surface, in that thin immaterial vapor that the body exudes and which surrounds it like an invisible film; the mirror that reflects them, the chess-board that maps out their future .

[...] The moves within the four drawings of the 'Laboratoire Vertigo' exhibit are also limited. Each player goes from square to square on this chessboard/ video game/ board-game while trying not to fall down any of the holes. The confined space implies a limited number of moves. The rules which function in these drawings evoke those which determine movement along the corridor of an administrative building. People stay close to the walls, walking towards their objective by a pre-determined route which is marked by signs. They conform to an unwritten social code. These places have been totally depersonalized and encourage neither relaxation nor idleness. Each person follows their route with a definite objective and unplanned events which disturb their purpose are not welcome. Nothing could be more absurd than to be in this place without knowing why. [...]