Esencias 05

away. I was moved by the magical power
of the images, and it transported me to
the condition ot hunter and prey, to feel,
to touch the earth with my skin, to depend
on the strength of my body, to orient my
attention by the timeless smell given off by
beings and things.
Antonio Mesenes
Poison noir is a picture and also perfume.
A smell in both cases that takes me into
the intimate and nostalgic world ot
memory, bestowing on me the extract
given off by the greeny black waters o f the
swamp; the green scum of the algae with
the dark mud ot the poo I, the greasy shore
and the backwater, the revitalizing emulsion
it binds together.
Joan Mora
Coffee is the blood of the night
and has in its aroma the heart of its smoke.
Antonio Murado
Joan Brossa
Smell and colour both act on our senses
in similar ways: they both engrave on the
memory a very intense impression.
As I was painting this series of pictures,
I tried to keep with me the memory ot the
odour ot rotting flowers, or that of the
rooms w here apples are left to dry. The
colour would be here the essence of its
intensity, its splendour and its extinction.
Andrés Nagel
In Sanskrit, nasa, 'nose', means perfume.
The indissoluble link between the
nose and perfumes has resulted in perfume-makers
being described as composers
of 'nose', an appellation which these
magicians -capable of identifying and
combining in perfect harmony 3,512
smells- unanimously detest! Snout, beak,
aquiline nose, Bourbon nose, flattened
nose or sn ub nose, our organ of olfaction,
with or without a good sense ot smell,
leads us where it pleases. lt is useless for
you to pretend you are unable to smell:
when the perfume of a woman wafts over
you, mister, you're lost, or on the way to
being: Do not attempt to siam the door in
its face or tweak its nose: the perfume
would laugh in your teeth and you would
take the foolish risk ot having happiness
disappear from under your very nose.
Unless, that is, you adopt the British
maxim which advises you to keep your
nose dean, and take care not to stick your
nose in other people's perfumes, which
would be a pity.
Corne on! Don't make that long face,
but dedicate yourself to the pleasure of
smelling out, whiffing and sniffing up all of
those fine sm ells that exist only in order to
be breathed in.
J uan Navarro Baldeweg
From the cloud hangs its shadow,
which walks behind.
The smell of the field opens the way
ahead.
Miquel Navarro
Concealed, caught, roofless, between wall s.
You die in desire for beauty,
you breathe through perforated walls of
pleasure,
full of plenitude.
You, concealed, caught, between roofless
wall s;
I bite the desire for your beauty.
From the void you breathe, through walls
perforated by your presence,
from pleasure to pain,
from that to plenitude.
Concealed, caught, roofless,
desiring beauty
you breathe between walls
perforated by your presence,
from pleasure to pain,
from pain to plenitude.
Pablo Palazuelo
... of how smell is message, thought and
memory.
... summer afternoon ... full of signs about
the precariousness of time and about
ho pe.
Carlos Pazos
The sm ell of films. «Mon manège à moi» *
1 could swear that the fi rst time I saw it
was in a film by Herzog, since when it has
appeared on a number of other occasions.
lt happened on a patch of waste ground,
in a car cementery or perhaps somewhere
that reminded me of one, or perhaps not.
lt doesn't really matter.
Close to this deserted landscape there
were some fairground booths. In one of
these, in a little cabin like one of those
cheap peep-shows, we found ourselves
witnesses to the anguished and cruel
dance performed by a chicken in a space
delimited by stiff curtains of fake velvet
and lit, of course, by red bulbs. The chicken's
claws ding, with little success, to a
revolving platform, in a vain attempt to
gain some kind of stability.
The smell o f the place was not recorded
on film. For me, it will always be a cocktail
of enchiladas, Mexican beer and airfreshener
spray.
Perejaume
* A song by Edith Piaf, which might
translate as My merry-go-round,
in reference to her up-and-down
relationship with «her man>>.
You ask me to speak to you of the smell
of the fountain of Llorà, but it is not easy
to be sure if you want me to speak to you
ot the real fountain or the painted fountain.
The latter, the painted fountain, in
which the water makes folds of linen as if
it bubbled up dressed and dried, most certainly
has a strong smell of turpentine and
linseed oil. .. On the other hand, I really
could not tell you the smell of the other,
the real fountain.
lt is not a particularty smelly fountain.
Llorà is not one of those fountains that
stink ot the devil's piss, noris it mentholated
by a fragrance of aromatic herbs ...
Although it is more than likely that the
wild boars and other animals find this
fountain by smell, it is not the smell that
takes us there. Nor do we manage to find
it by sight, amid that dense growth of
poplars and hazelnut trees that box it in,
but by the sound. The fountain of Llorà
sounds, in fact, just as if I were to pronunce
its name to you: it is a rising and continuing
sound, like the name «Liorà>>.
,.
'
We know the fountain by its sound,
which is difficult because it always sounds
the same, because the sound dances there
like a flame, but does not change.
Víctor Pimstein Ratinoff
Esencia
In contrast to the pallid images which
we generally call «memory>>, there are privileged
moments in which a perfume, an
essence, overwhelms us by surprise, dragging
us violently from the place and the
time we occupy to transport us to a hidden
place, to a forgotten time. The experience
shakes us with the intensity of a
storm, and brandishes in the air in front of
and inside us the ghosts of a lost room, of
a voice, of the light that illuminates other
faces, of a different air.
Thus, for an instant, we have the privilege
of living simultaneously in different
times, of occupying several places at once.
We defy the tyranny ot the present that
enchains us day after day and we relega te
it to its due importance in the continua!
transit of living: that of converting our
desire into memory and our yearning into
nostalgia and imagination.
Du ring those moments life unfolds in
simultaneous and contradictory dimensions
and progressions. We are simultaneously
a 'were' a nd a 'will be'. The present
becomes the body of time, the tense
and vibrant surface on which the reflections
of the changing light of the skies
and the dense light that pushes up from
the depths converge. In that instant, the
world takes on a corporeity so uplifting
and rich, so detailed and precise that
when it passes it leaves us like castaways,
surprised to find ourselves still
alive on the very shore f rom which we
set out.
lt is strangely moving that that perfume,
that intense, fleeting and volatile
essence unleashed by the storm should
be none other than the key giving access
to our memory, to the most profound,
most private territory of our imagination.
The memory makes use of that essence in
order to make itself present, in the way
that a spirit can make use of any body to
manifest itself, leaving us when it vanishes
the full and bitter taste of our own
mortality.
I set out to paint pictures that will be
like those essences: paths giving access to
the materiality of time. I would like them
to be capable of extinguishing themselves
in the moment of being seen, like that perfume
which seems to vanish while it is
really ramifying itself in the dark, working
the depth of our memory.
Like a perfume-maker, the abstractor
of mediaeval alchem y, I set out to distil
essences, to find thàt which seems to be
purest, most permanent in things, the
principie that defines them and eludes
me time and time again. To distil is to do
violence to the integrity ot the material
world, to the apparent integrity of the
memory, it is to fragment it by force, it is
a form of cruelty that renounces the
whole in an attempt to take possession
of that dense and volatile particle in
which the secret ot its being and its ultimate
truth reside.
I hope that my pictures are as unsettling
as a déià-vu, and that they assault
with a contained violence the people who
look at them, obliging them to seek inside
themselves the precise place they claim.
That they should belong to the person
who, on looking at them, makes them so
much his or her own as to feel that the
painter was simply an instrument of the
person who, as spectator, has made use of
him in order to arrive at his or her own
vision.
Víctor Pimstein Ratinoff
Enric Pladevall
In Catalan, alba is a type of wood,
poplar, but it is also the first brightening of
day. The light breaks on the horizon and
splashes with white the black of the night
that vanishes.
Reality has multiple appearances, and
knowing and feeling its subtle shades stimulates
and sharpens the senses.
The poplar tree has a smell and when it
is cut it is as if we were treading the still
dewy earth of daybreak.
The sculpture is hollow inside and has
holes through which the smell of the
poplar can be enjoyed. The power of
attraction, the sensuality, the strength and
the impossibility of arriving at a total
knowledge and understanding of a work
ot art is what I am trying to express, to
suggest.
Jaume Plensa
Olfactive character: Specific odorific
feature which distinguishes and defines an
olfactive torm. For example a chypre with
an animal character, a fougère with an
aromatic character.
(Tex taken from the Dictionnaire du
Charo Pradas
fangage perfumé, Éditions
Quarante Huit Publicité.)
Human means able to smell.
That voluntary and discriminatory act (a
culture reveals itself through the smells it
repudiates) which consists ot smelling the
breeze, the dew, the wind, an armpit or
the aroma ot a cup ot tea demonstrates
the existence ot a healthy olfactory appetitie,
a curiosity or even a nasal greed
which often proves to be incredibly destructive.
Albert Ràfols Casamada
(From the Dictionnaire du
langage perfumé)
My painting entiled Lavender is an
attempt to visually express an olfactive
sensation.
Being a visual art, painting normally
feeds itself on visual sensations and, semetimes
on tactile ones that try to express by
means of texture what the same pictorial
material can produce. For this reason, to
express an olfactive sensation was a problem
of a certain complexity in its planning,
since, in some way, one had to transpose
to visual language a series ot sensations
that do not affect vision.
I chose the perfume of lavender because
I thought it would allow me to move
within a field of connotations which, given
my kind ot painting, would be a bit more
visuallizable.
For the main characteristics of lavender,
I selected its sensation of freshness, of
pure country air, and the visual memory of
the warm tonality of the flower of lavender,
which in the south ot France extends
over enormous expanses of lands, creating
with it a very particular note ot color
within the landscape.
In order to express these sensations I
used very diluted oil paints to dye the can-
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