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Lived déjà vu (already seen)<br />
Seen the eyes<br />
That evoke vivid memories<br />
Ernesto Neto<br />
This piece speaks of the body, of the skin. In the artist’s own words, ‘…<br />
all bodies have smells’. The body of Carioca foam is shaped like a heart,<br />
which is joined by two umbilical cords, one father and the other mother.<br />
This happened on a beach in Rio and has the smell of the foam of the<br />
Carioca waves.<br />
Andrei Roiter<br />
The Smell of Tomorrow<br />
Used news will smell like a windowless, dusty waiting room, with some<br />
broken furniture, books and papers on the table, dead computers on the floor.<br />
From behind a wall comes the muffled sound of a radio mumbling about<br />
hurricanes, elections, Wall Street numbers, melting ice, football victories,<br />
oil prices, Hollywood gossip, forest fires, horsemeat, corrupted clowns and<br />
lost alpinists. An earthy scent of forgotten events and faraway travels will fill<br />
the space.”<br />
—Andrei Roiter on “Used News”<br />
Simeón Saíz Ruiz<br />
What is most easily recognized in the image are the bare branches on which no<br />
bud has yet appeared and the earth, reddish, with no green stem.<br />
We are in winter and it must be cold. A cold that contains the smell but can<br />
also easily expand it in the flow of vapours emanating from the frozen earth as<br />
the sun warms it.<br />
We certainly smell damp earth; the darker areas of the picture undoubtedly<br />
accentuate the smell. Only after looking carefully at the picture and unpacking<br />
the meaning of certain forms, interpreting them as fallen bodies—it’s impossible<br />
that they could simply be reclining bodies—we will realize that what we are<br />
really smelling is blood, if we know what spilled blood smells like.<br />
Would it be contradictory to say that really the only thing the picture smells<br />
of is oil paint and dammar varnish? No, one smell leads to another.<br />
Pedro G. Romero<br />
‘If all things turned to smoke, the nose would be the discerning organ.’—Heraclitus<br />
Things are distinguished by their smell. This is a classic response when it comes<br />
to resolving the polemic of ‘pictura ut poesis’. Smell makes them real. Artifice is<br />
nothing but a mechanism in pursuit of that smell. The deception works when it<br />
arouses the nose.<br />
Love, courtly love, comes from the same debate. While painting and poetry<br />
seek to possess the reality, that erotic ghost, the real presence of the smell of<br />
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