Esencias 05

Jim Bird
My Summer Residence.
The shirt is drying on the line in the breeze
from lavender.
The house lies among hills of lavender.
Twillght is stained with the blue and
green of the round bushes that rise brilliant
from the reddish earth .
Our footsteps create perfumed worlds.
We carry armfuls of fragrance to fill
boxes and baskets.
Part of this blue fragrance w ill go with
us to Brooklyn, where, when the howl of
police-car sirens awaken us, we'll know
that breeze from the lavender still caresses
the hills of Alpera.
Bram Bogart
lf I go out of my studio (I live in the
country), and I get rid ot the smell of my
paintings, a smell to which I am completely
accustomed, ot linseed oil, varnish,
turpentine and pigments, etc., a nd I go for
a walk in the woods and gardens (we have
about 10 hectares). I smell the seent of
nature, and I breathe in this seent as much
as I can to clean out my lungs.
lt was after such a walk that I named your
picture, Pretty Garden.
Alfons Borrell
Bram Bogart
This picture is an island. The acrylic
resins and the pigments, al most odouri ess,
evoke here by its absence the musty smell
of oil turpentine of a canvas painted with
oils that drifts loose on other oceans.
Joan Brossa
Perfume is the confetti of seent.
José Manuel Broto
I thought that the sense of smell could
experience pleasures equal to those of
hearing and sight, each sense having the
capacity to perceive, by a natural disposition
and an erudite culture, new impressions,
multiplying these, co-ordinating
them, composing with them that whole
which a work constitutes ...
lf no-one is able to distinguish, without
some particular intuition, developed by
means of study, between a picture by a
great master and a bad painting, between
a melody by Beethoven and one by
Clapissen, nor can anyone, without a prior
initiation, avoid confounding, out of the
blue, an aroma created by a genuine artist
from a confused mixture fabricated by a
manufacturer to be sold in shops and
department stores ...
Perfumes almost never come from the
flowers whose names they bear, the artist
who would dare to take his elements only
from nature would produce nothing better
than a bastard work, without authenticity,
devoid of style, given that the essence
obtained from the distillation of the flowers
would be no more than a very distant
and very vulgar analogy to the aroma of
the living flower, which expands its effluvia
in the plant itself ...
In perfumery, the artist completes the
initial odour of nature, whose aroma he
cuts and mounts just as a jeweller purifies
and enhances the water of a precious
stone. Gradually, the arcana of this art,
the most neglected of all, have opened
up before him. Now he unravels this
varied language, as suggestive as that of
literature, this style of such astonishing
concision beneath its imprecise and
vague appearance. To do so he has had
to work at the grammar, to comprehend
the syntax of smells to understand perfectly
the rules which govern them and,
after all this, to compare the works of the
great masters.
Carmen Calvo
From J. K. Huysmans, À rebours
Like writing, painting is full of colours,
sensations and acts. This picture, entiled
1986-1992, incorporates the memory, the
celebration, the impressions, the smell and
the taste of love and death.
The smell of the drooping flower,
picked half wilted, which when dry gives
us yet another different aroma.
The sensation of repose transmitted by
the fetish objects gathered together by the
love that once gave them.
lt is not the smell of death, but of the
memory of love sofly left.
And a gentle breeze that brings us the
fragrance of certain springs.
Luis Candaudap
Colour orange vital and concupiscent,
acid and attractive as a poisonous toadstool.
I discovered the tone as a reaction to the
blue of the background. And that which
exudes so much life or recalis the oxygen
on yhe heights of the summits does nothing
other than specify its supremely false
aspect, with this white zone of infection
which corresponds to the part of me that
is a man.
With regard to the part of me that is a
painter, that has already left behind it the
things that can be expressed in words and
dreams of looking behind the painted
object. The picture aspires to the quality of
a rind, like a little cranium the size of a fist
which shines for a moment and falls with
an orange smille.
What does the colour of an empty
word smell ot?
Jordi Cano
1 + 1 = 1, The door of time
Perfume and time have in common the
fact that their different parts are never present
at the same moment. There is a space
of olfactive and emotional time which
develops within an irreversible chronological
order selected by the person who creates
it. The effluvium of perfume expands
beyond the appearence we perceive when
we smell it for the first time or only once.
lf we smell it gradually over time, we can
appreciate that the melodic phrase of a
perfume is infinitely broader than each
one of the perceptions it offers us.
Anthony Caro
The sculpture's seent is there in the title.
Some sculptures give off a strong clear
perfume, easy to define; in others the
smell, the title is as hard to grasp as catching
a shadow.
The smell of a herb is what comes to
mi nd when we think ot that herb and so it
sometimes is with an art work. But often
the material, the shapes and the syntax
overwhelm it and we cannot recali the
seent - only the parts that make it up.
llike the idea of a work ot art having i t's
own seent, it focuses on the ineffable,
what makes art touch our senses. our
feelings.
i
Tom Carr
With this sculpture I have tried to give
body and colour to the evocation of a
sm ell.
This is a work which occupies the space
without touching the floor, and seems to
intersect slightly with the wall while suggesting
the other part. Its form is organic,
fluid, and it insinuates movement and
weightlessness. lt is painted in a soft overall
degradation which starts as an intense
magenta purple that is saturated until it
becomes white.
This emanation of form and colour is
gradually diluted in nothing so as to evidence
in this way that it comes to be an
infinitesimal part of Everything.
Joaquim Chancho
Painting is generally looked at and
understood on the basis of the visual perception.
For the painter, however, other
factors intervene, and while these are articulated
in a visual whole, they are at the
same time potentiated in the succession of
decisions that one takes in front of the picture:
memory, knowledge, origin are plotted
in a continuous coming and going,
along an inviolable route of the senses.
Touch, sounds, smells are also protagonists
in the pictorial time.
Past experiences are brought back in
this way to a present that no longer exists,
in a metamorphosis of 'reality' in which
the painting can not be a play of shapes or
of colours.
Eduardo Chillida
* About the void
* Music of the spheres
* W ind combs
* Murmur of límits
* Eulogy of water
* Place of encounters
* The profund is the air
lf we take note ot the titles Chillida
gives to his sculptures, we become aware
ot the metaphysical depth ot his poetics
and the intense sensory charge of his
works. The fact is that Chillida is eminently
mental; he rationalizes with precision lines,
torms and spaces, and does so not by
applying a stereotyped formula but in
obedience to the dictates of a sensibility
which works with the five senses, in that it
is by way of sensations that he establishes
the first contact with a raw material, with
a graphic technique, with a specific place.
Cyril Christo
What are these flames hurled
Across a divided world?
Wings descended
From a sculpture of invisibility
Daniel Giralt-Miracle
Returned,
Joining earth
In flowers that provoke the wind.
Where will these blue and yellow embers
un i te
In the explosion of their garden's flight?
Children grape
In the suspension
Of their unveiled laughter,
Lovers are absorbed
In the vestment of perpetuity,
Shadows burn racing rivers
In the brilliance
Ot their speechless wake,
Before a sky
Roaming,
Kneeling
Within reach of man's shelter.
Victoria Civera
Cyril Christo
Perfume, m. Pleasing smell: «the perfume
of the flowers» (syn.: aroma, essence,
fragrance)./ /Industrial composition which
gives off a sweet smell: «to spend one's
money on perfumes»./ /fig. Something
w hich awakens a welcome, pleasant
memory: «to give off a perfume of sweetness».
Antoni Clavé
When I arn far from home
the odor I miss the most
is that of my studio.
Jordi Dedeu
And in some way the mechanism that
makes this interna! fibre vibrate is set in
motion. The magic formula. We know
that it exists because we have experienced
the symptoms. The conjunction of
memories and sensations that give rise to
this special emotion that brings us into
contact with what we once were. The
masters of enchantment knew how to
open the mysterious phial, peeling away
the skin of civilization that history has
formed around the animal. Styx, Sumer,
Egypt. The boatman and the coin.
Greece. Sparta. Pandora. lshtar and the
Serpent. The Necronomicon. Víking runes.
Celtic legends. Velazquez and Vulcan.
Goya. Wagner. Tolkien and the dwarves.
Lovecraft and Chtulhu. The remate cadence
that transports us to the origin. Water,
air, fire and earth.
Enter, close your eyes and breathe.
Minute residues in suspension that
transform a biological response into a bridge
to our ancestral past.
We will go side by side with the
Minotaur through the labyrinth. We will
climb in reverent ascent the thousand
steps to pay tribute to the Aztec sun.
Dust, sweat, iron. Primordial heat of the
crucible. Ashes. Ruins. Embers on the
pyre. Primitive offerings. Allow yourself
to be captured by the fable and perhaps
you will be overwhelmed by the atavistic
aroma that the object in itself does not
possess.
Let us trave! the road backwards. lf a
particular smell, at a particular moment,
brings back to you memories of what you
have lived, the constructed image seeks to
be the genesis of that which is not a part
of your own personal experience but is
latent as a part of the collective essence ot
humanity.
Joan Descarga
Essence is, amongst other things, the
highly concentrated extract of certain
substances which give a smell and a taste
to a product.
Essence is also the nature of things,
what they really are, what is most characteristíc
and important in them. And, finally,
the 'fifth essence' is the original matter
that gives rise to all things. The finest part
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