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As the viewers, we are thus like a kind of imperfect librarian, as Borges says about
man in his story The Library of Babel. All of this is not too far from the perfumer’s
piano, that precious tool of the composer of fragrances, where the bottles that
contain the different raw materials used to craft the essences are stored. Just like
Ernesto Ventós, we know that life smells and penetrates us without barriers, imposing
its presence. In the transmission of a memory, smells do not deteriorate as much
as images do; instead, smells remain vivid, like a refuge for memory. As Walter
Benjamin pointed out, “A scent may drown years in the odour it recalls”. This
collection appeals to the need to interpret scent correctly, to go beyond its virtual
immateriality to sensitise the immediate, like a musical performance. Eugenio Merino
ironically represents it when he sculpts the collector kneeling with a reproduction of
Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit, thus multiplying its impossibility and paradoxical nature. But
beyond the conceptual play, scent has no limits, especially in this collection where the
visual is interpreted and distilled through a kind of sense orgy.
We can think about the theories of Michel Serres, for whom the history of
science is subjected to turbulence; that is, it is subjected to random connections
of all kinds among different areas. The viewer standing before the works in the
olorVISUAL collection is also witnessing a kind of drift. Meantime, a series of
quotes, texts mostly written by the authors of the works, give us hints as to what
they aim to tell us, brief texts that reveal obsessions, sometimes more literal,
other times more poetic, like a chaotic walk where experience reigns supreme.
Perhaps because of all of this, there is no centre to the exhibition; all angles and
directions are valid when deciding on the way to take through it. The exception is
the starting point, where the figure of the collector holding Artist’s Shit accompanies
premises like the one proposed by Joan Brossa, that perfume is the confetti of the
nose, or that ideas can be smelled, as projected by the work by Eugenio Ampudia.
Scent becomes like a solid, iron root, like the landscape sculpted by Martín
Chirino, although paradoxically it becomes fluid, like the trace of magenta that is
diluted like the scent of Tom Carr. As Juan Luis Moraza notes, the nose occupies
the centre of the universe and the aura exists in the olfactory sense.
I believe that it is easier for something to smell of the past than of the future.
To Miroslaw Balka, the smell of the past is concealed in the scent of materials, of
sculptures. Balka thinks about the scent of Christmas tree pine needles, or a bar of
soap, or rubber. Scent as the trigger of memory is a dangerous knot. Like that which
Jorge Perianes uses to engage an apple that does not smell with a tree growing out of
the wall. It is an illusory reality yet also a synaesthetic one, since we can see it.
Balka’s and Perianes’ materials are simple and everyday, but more than
anything they are a resonance of memory. I believe that they somehow sketch
an erotic connection with death, like in Bataille’s philosophy, a death that is
paradoxically the scent of existence. It is as if progress ended up devouring
us, heralding the end even before beginning. Not a few works smell of difficult
times, like the harsh, elegant winter offered by Eva Lootz. The artist points out
how copper does not smell, but the hand working with it does. In her work, snow
is drawn like skin and the sky as frozen silence. This work, like the ones by Balka
and Perianes, inspires in us a kind of nostalgia for nature. We can also notice it
in the cigar and smokeless pipe by Chema Madoz. Or in Robert Mapplethorpe’s
bare flower, surrounded by smoke, which holds up without wilting, like a
youthful, apollonian, serene body. The sexual connotations are obvious, as
they are in the bouquet of roses by Juan Hidalgo, which are accompanied by a
mirror and a condom. But Tony Matelly’s work is clearly where the eternal takes
on the most significance, falsifying weeds and stressing, in this case, the character
of abandoned site that comes to mind when thinking about the revival of this
space of La Tabacalera.
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