Esencias 05

stroke, we can immerse ourselves - if the
artist is honest with his or her work - in the
work's psychology in the same way that a
mix of essential oils in a particular
proportion gives every perfume its own
character. Drawing is a speciallanguage of
direct expression open to constant
experimentation. lt is a highly flexible torm
of w riting that gives the author a freedom
of movement that is difficult to achieve in
other artístic techniques. This is possible
because hand and mind communicate
directly through a f luid energy,
automatically reflecting movements and
emotions poured forth in lines traced upon
paper.
The artist's features are of great
expressive value; they are a living entity
which, with all their fullness or emptiness,
concentration or expansion, movement or
stillness, express aggression, sensitivity,
sensuality, fear, etc. In short, they convey
particular states of mind or view of the
world, intangible, impalpable qualities that
curiously are also to be fou nd in perfumes.
However, we believe that the sense of
smell is linked to a part of the brain that
governs subconscious behaviour and
that t he message o f s mel I touches us at a
deep emotional level that visual and
auditory information can never reach
given that smell arouses primitive emotional
responses.
lt is this intimate interrelationship,
therefore, between the worl ds of art and
perfume - which would permit us to
continue raising other parallels - which
makes me dare on many occasions to
interpret a work of art on the basis of
criteri a used to appreciate perfume,
differences of genre apart, of course.
The essence of a collection
Oriol Gual i Dalmau
Collecting is an approach to life. There
are those who collect stamps and others
who collect coins or books or art. In short,
there are people who collect everything
including feelings, memories and
nostalgia. The true collector is a
compulsive being who lives in a strange
world half way between pleasure and
anxiety. Nothing is more pleasing to him
or her than to acquire the desired object,
than to get hold of that elusive piece, than
to achieve some distant goal. However,
these are ephemeral pleasures that barely
last the time that it takes for a restless urge
to rise up in the face of new objects of
desire, new pieces, new apparently
unattainable objectives.
For the collector, each ítem gathered is
an accumulation of sensations that go
beyond the object itself or its beauty,
unusual nature or aesthetic, documentary
or financial value. lt is a cocktail of all
these things, together with the memories
associated with it, the difficulties
overcome to possess it, and the anecdotes
and experiences generated during the
search for it. Evocation and memory are, in
short, fundamentally important to the
person who has carefully and passionately
gathered together a collection. And this
takes us back to perfumes.
In the complex mechanism of the
human brain , there are few things as
capable of triggering memory as smells.
An aroma, perfume or particular fragrance
sudden ly emerges from all those
enveloping us, though we pay them no
heed, and our mind rushes back at
dizzying speed to another place, anot her
time, when this smell was closely linked to
a moment of pleasure, grief, happiness or
surprise. W ho does not have his or her
private collection of smells? From the rich
smell of the countryside after rain or the
flurrying seent of jasmine on a summer's
evening to the most private of perfumes
such as, in my case, the smell of my first
Jover or refried beans with bacon, which I
will always associate with the house of my
mother's parents and with the sound of
Elena Francis on the radio.
Despite all this, we are not accustomed
to valuing our sense ot smell. For most
species of animal it is a survival factor; for
man it has become atavistic and has lost its
importance in our everyday lives. Luckily,
however, we humans are not all alike.
For Ernesto Ventós, the sense of smell is
primordial. Born into a family ot perfume
makers and brought up surrounded by
flasks of essential oils, he has dedicated his
life to the subtle art of creating fragrances.
A renowned expert in perfumes, he has
invested and continues to invest many
hours in educating his nose. Thanks to his
determination and the time spent on his
apprenticeship , Ernesto is capable of
creating the most delicate of essences or
the more prosaic smell of a burnt burger.
Thanks to this skill, or perhaps driven by
his compulsion, Ernesto is now an art
collector.
This perfumer has already shown his
propensity for gathering unusual items in
his remarkable collection of sticks with
two uses. However, as he himself recounts
in the introduction to this catalogue, it
was his collaboration as a creator of
perfumes in the exhibition 0/factory
Suggestions that gave rise to his passion
for contemporary art and eventually to
this exhibition presented here. His
unquenchable tenacity, his refined
sensibility and his passion for the world ot
smell, together with his urge to collect,
mean that the inevitable was bound to
occur: Ernesto has managed to gather a
magnificent body of works of art in which
the world of smells is the connecting bo nd.
This is unquestionably an atypical
collection in terms of both its contents and
the way it was conceived. Ernesto Ventós
is not the usual kind of collector. Most
of the works gathered here were
commissioned. Like the patrons of oid ,
Ernesto asked the artists to produce a
work related to the smell that they found
the most evocative. Wor.king in this way,
at a time w hen artists value their creative
freedom above all else, has not always
been responded to with understanding.
However, this was not the end of the
matter: to form part of the collection, each
work must be supported by a text written
or selected by the artist that reinforces the
link between the painting or sculpture and
the world of smell. Ernesto's forceful
ability to convince, fed fundamentally by
his enthusiasm and constancy, has fed to a
collection of pieces by leading artists who
have understood the nature of the project
and have shared the dream of the person
responsible for starting it up and seeing
it through. The result is undeniably
surprising.
Behind each work of art lie long hours
of almost entirely personal contact
between the creator and collector, who
enjoys inspiring the artist with enthusiasm
for the idea. Hence, little by little, two
collections in one have taken shape: one is
a major collection of art and the other, no
less important, is a group of friends.
Visitors should let themselves be
ensnared by the magic of the shapes, the
sensuality of the textures and t he mystery
of the lights and shadows, and they should
make an effort to draw on their memory
to evoke the s melis that each of the works
in t he exhibition suggests. This is the only
way to arrive at their true essence.
Francesc Abad
The shortness of saying
the smell of the earth
the smell of thinking
We had the experience but missed the
meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the
experience
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
lt had not occurred to me to think
about smell until Ernesto Ventós introduced
me to doing precisely that. In fact, 1
think that my work is implicitly related to
smell, in the sense that nature, the landscape,
the leaves, the tree-trunks ... have
their own smell. I like the smell of the
earth just after the rain, even the most
everyday things like peeling potatoes, the
earthy smell they have w hen they do not
come from the supermarket. In fact, thinking
has a smell; the smell of books, of
their pages, is the smell of the letters, the
interna! smell of reading and of thinking.
Nature and thought, the externa! smell
and the interna! smell, complement one
another in their fragility, the smell of two
worlds that exclude one another but are
both witnesses to the ephemeral. Smell as
the sense to which least attention has
been paid, because smelling, perhaps, like
thinking, does not have to be consciously
carried out, but comes from silence, precisely
because from them is where it is possible
to create a work of art or an artístic
work.
Sergi Aguilar
Smell of
Desert
S tones
Tunnel
Kanal Water Path
Dry
Sp i ces
Riverbed
Sa nd
Earth
Wet
Frederic Amat
Every perfume is the memory el an essence
Another name in Perfumery to designate
the essential oils extracted from aromatic
plants. The use of the word essence
may be a mistake, because at times it
includes olfactive compositions giving the
impression that these are the result of the
extract of a natural product w hen in
actual fact it is a reconstitution with no
other relation to the plant than that of an
olfactive similitude.
Amat
Peratallada, 12 .VI.93
Miquel Barceló
Still-life that reeks of life
In relation to those artists w ho create
the new world of art -the so-called
impulse of the present- on the basis of
odourless, artificial technologies and fantastical
imaginaries, Barceló does so «in
the sam e way». That is, according to the
specific manner of the Catalan contribution
to the unive rsal. In t his he is like Miró
(and even the early Dalí), like Tàpies and
Brossa, or amongst those of his own
generation, Amat and Perejaume, all of
them advancing towards the f uture while
travelling back to the original roots of the
human: so we have rootedness, a fascination
for the primitive, linguístic
correspndences and simple rituals, a poor
poetics of the object, crossroads of civilizations,
lyrical illumination, ethical timelessness,
comic nihilism, a break with the
norm; in short, a universal and highly personal
invention constituted of the highest
value of difference.
The geni us of Barceló, like that of these
others, asks to be explained in terms of the
artístic quality of those who dig down to
draw up the force of the immensity of nothingness
in order to raise it up to the
heights of the absolute. His intellectual
constancy, like that of these others, emerges
from the ethical radicalism of the art
life. Distancing themselves from analytical
and linguístic minimalization and, at the
same time, from rhetorical and narrative
excesses, they implode the spiritual tension
in the genre. Because it is in the
identity that in the dark illuminates the
darkness ot darity. At the domestic extreme,
art of the depths and as such not
urban, they thus displace even geographical
mythologies · towards extemporaneous
sites of the contemporary, and in spite of
this, communicationally celebrated, their
triumph celebrates the telluric, organic
centre where they rot with a tenacious
will to exception.
Barceló's magnificent sculpture speaks
of more than it says, and in consequence
it is my aim to note hera some of these
tensions we referred to above, inherent
in «the same way». The classic theme ot
the still-life becomes internally subject
rather than genre, hence the choice of
poor tubers in opposition to the bourgeois
rhetoric of succulent fruits. The opacity
of the abstract white on top of the
rust known as the latent repose of biological
life disembarrassed of vital variegations.
The roughness of the material
expresses its struggle for interiorization
in the face of the neutrality and perfection
of the industrial object. A temporal
timelessness in which the breath of the
visual impact passes through the lethargy
of its fate.
Sole equivalence, t he sprit expresses
itself with the same corporeality, suspended
and rooted, circular rhythmic string
and drying and ripening, born out of the
earth, even if impoverished.
Still-life that reeks of human life, like
the condition ot the vital entrails of art.
Protuberance of the spirit that reeks of
death.
Vicenç Altaió
Erwin Bechtold
Joan Bennàssar
o
eye
wave
oil
to smell
sense of smell
oily
oligarchy
olympus
to sniff
olive tree
elm
sm ell
o
Erwin Bechtold
lt belongs to a series entitled
. Specifically «Your seents»
born from woman's odor, with its play of
dependencies, placidity and madness, ruptures
and lightness.
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