18Libro_Sinestesia_completo-final

taste flavours, hear sounds and feel when we touch something, when one of
these senses is severely underdeveloped or absent, another one often develops to
an unusual degree. But is it possible to experience flavours when we hear words?
Can we see colours when we hear a sound? Of course we can. This is what is
known as synaesthesia, which is as closely tied to art as it is to life itself; in fact, it
is said that newborns experience the different senses mixed together.
The sensation of art, just like the sensation of synaesthetic perceptions,
is often automatic or involuntary. Sometimes, as with synaesthesia, this first
impression becomes a phenomenon that remains stable over time. Other times,
it becomes more a recollection and vanishes. However, just like all information,
this sensation is stored as a memory, and over time it becomes increasingly
inaccessible, turning into what we call the curve of forgetting. Also, into the
context of our lives. Hence this exhibition is curated in this way, even though
it more resembles the literary resource of synaesthesia than synaesthesia
itself. Ultimately, the goal is to emphasise each work’s condition to create an
ambiance, an atmosphere which is capable of enriching the description of this
idiosyncratic, unique collection made up of the visual scent of Ernesto Ventós.
This exhibition, which includes some of the fascinating works from the
olorVISUAL collection, attempts to activate the senses, something like penetrating
a sensorial abyss related to our history, to life. As viewers, we will have the sense of
walking and surrendering to the unknown, similar to walking through a forest, like
someone who is chasing a scent. Thus, different temperatures are generated, taking
advantage of the memory and nature of the space. Some will operate separately,
individually, while others seek joint meanings, getting a new lease on life when they
are visually conjoined. The space is planned from many different vantage points.
Not a few authors focus their experiences through synaesthesia: painters like
Kandinsky, poets like Arthur Rimbaud, composers like Alexander Scriabin and
Olivier Messiaen and writers like Vladimir Nabokov are just a few examples.
Synaesthesia is a mix of auditory, visual, gustative, olfactory and tactile sensations,
something like a maximum expansion of feelings, associations that help us to
memorise abstract concepts by linking them to sensorial realities; in short, associations
that help us to understand the metaphorical universe of contemporary art.
Together, the works in the olorVISUAL collection expand the meanings of
each individual work with their olfactory traits. It is not so different from when
Joseph Kosuth planned his work One and Three Chairs in the 1960s with the goal of
offering the viewer a kind of analytical interpretation of three ways of channelling
the meaning of the same object. The proposal is closer to synaesthesia than to the
world of hallucinations because it is not a false perception. Nothing in the environs
triggers a hallucination—unless one is under the effect of substances like LSD,
for example—but in synaesthesia there is an external stimulus that induces the
synaesthetic sensation. Hope as green or that love is red are colour notions that waver
if we think about Fauvism. Only by putting ourselves in the place of the synaesthetic
association can we understand the real existence of a red room or blue apples. Only a
synaesthete can see the word ‘sky’ as orange, even if it is written in black ink.
The attitude of the perfumer, a trade in which Ernesto Ventós worked
through family tradition and vocation, envelopes us in another time. It is similar
to what Michael Hardt once described regarding time in prison, a time that
stretches and collapses in a kind of optical illusion. It is a predestined time where
nothing is unpredictable. Hence prisoners try in vain to grasp onto this volatile
and ephemeral time by giving it some expression, even if just symbolically,
such as by making scratches on the wall to mark its passing. In the works of the
olorVISUAL collection, the opposite happens: time stretches out as a defence
mechanism against a world of events that happen too quickly.
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