18Libro_Sinestesia_completo-final

Andrei Roiter
The Smell of Tomorrow
Used news will smell like a windowless, dusty waiting room, with some broken
furniture, books and papers on the table, dead computers on the floor. From
behind a wall comes the muffled sound of a radio mumbling about hurricanes,
elections, Wall Street numbers, melting ice, football victories, oil prices,
Hollywood gossip, forest fires, horsemeat, corrupted clowns and lost alpinists.
An earthy scent of forgotten events and faraway travels will fill the space.
Bernardí Roig
This time Ernesto concealed his uneasiness because he knew that light smells
only of the thoughts that sight can capture and that the dark can lie but smells
of nothing. Or so he believed…
Valentín Vallhonrat
When I was a boy, in the old wood and glass elevator that went up to the
apartment where my mother and I lived, once or twice a year I would recognize,
combined with the smell of the lift, a mixture of Chesterfield cigarettes and
an old cologne that contained sandalwood and vetiver. It was the smell of my
father. He died two years ago and I cannot remember that smell. All that is left is
the description.
Miquel Barceló
Still-life that reeks of life
In relation to those artists who create the new world of art- the so-called impulse
of the present -on the basis of odourless artificial technologies and fantastical
imaginaries, Barceló does so “in the same way”. That is, according to the
specific manner of the Catalan contribution to the universal. In this he is like
Miró (and even the early Dalí), like Tàpies and Brossa, or amongst those of his
own generation, Amat and Perejaume, all them advancing towards the future
while traveling back to the oginal roots of the human: so we have rottenness,
a fascination for the primitive, linguistic correspondences and simple rituals, a
poor poetics of the object, crossroads of civilizations, lyrical illumination, ethical
timelessness, comic nihilism, a break with the norm; in short, a universal and
highly personal invention constituted of the highest value of difference.
The genius of Barceló, like that of these others, asks to be explained in
terms of the artistic quality of those who dig down to draw up the force of
the immensity of nothingness in order to raise it up to the heights of absolute.
His intellectual constancy, like that of these others, emerges from the ethical
radicalism of art life. Distancing themselves from analytical and linguistic
minimization and, at the same time, from rhetorical and narrative excesses,
they implode the spiritual tension in the genre. Because it is in the identity
that in the dark illuminates the darkness of clarity. At the domestic extreme,
art of the depths and as such not urban, they thus displace even geographical
mythologies towards extemporaneous sites of the contemporary, and in spite of
149