23OV_Olor de Málaga-16

Conceived from the feeling of abandonment
that is produced by loss, this piece
is dedicated to the person who experiences
the absence of another.
The scent with which the handkerchief
is impregnated engenders a feeling
of nostalgia, immersing the viewer
in a plenitude laden with meaning and
pleasure. Like a memory that levitates.
Alex Jasch
Der kleine Kreischer, 2009
Ode to mould
to make ones life in passing!
among the remains
of which one has no need
the sentiment of affairs
or,
the smell of things
the proof
is in itself
the aroma
in principle
it’s all
framed, realized
relativised
perpendicular
to the perfumes
No sound, from where?
because salt makes things taste
Little screamer
And this is almost always:
The decline, the decay
De- and cay always form a second nature
Life begins in and by life, sometimes
threatening, mouldy.
Then, therefore, when the thing actually
is, just by nature of that,
which marks this thing, when a being
that is in living strength so much
happens,
that a thing begins to dissolve in mist,
in smell, in dark stench smoldering dissolves,
is this then truly in accordance with
its character?
Thus, decay and mould are not signs
of dissolution and destruction, but the
designation for a more complete spreading
of the particularities and relations
of things and events.
Fleur Noguera
Smoke, 2008
Smoke is an aerial, atmospheric fiction,
an incitement to wander. The rhythm
is hypnotic, accompanied by a piece of
electronic music.
The protagonist is a cloud of smoke that
lets itself be carried along by the flow of
events. The story is fixed by the treatment,
precise, floating on the white
background.
The drawings of J. H. Fragonard* inspired
the first few seconds of the animation,
the scene with the smoke
merging into the foliage of the tree.
Smoke is also the smell of camping in
the forest, of sausages grilled over a
wood fire, of snow-covered mountains,
of polluting factories, of roasting metal,
of a cigarette burning down.
It’s when I reflect on the sources of inspiration
that the precise memory of two
olfactory emotions come back to me.
The smell of a cigarette in summer
when the weather is hot.
The day I met a cloud during a walk in
the Alps. Curiously, the cloud had a perfume.
*[Les grands cyprés de la Villa d’Este
(1760) J.H. Fragonard (Grasse, 1732-
Paris, 1806)]
Ángel Alonso
S/T, 1994
Early one morning, almost at dawn,
Alonso is woken by the smell of the
smoke from the burning fields. He goes
to the wrought-iron gate of the Ferme
de la Chapelle and sees that the fire is
coming toward his house. At first
he was frightened, but then he realized
that this was just a part of the
farm work, and stayed to enjoy spectacle.
When the fire had burnt out, it
was an absolute vision: the black land,
like a tapestry, the most beautiful
he had seen in all his life. What a poor
thing painting is!¹ he thought,
and started to walk over the black
fields. Alonso began to collect grass and
carbon. He got sacks and put the ashes
in them without touching them. The
forms, the vegetable skeleton, remained
intact; the fire had destroyed the bodies
without destroying their shape.
¹ [Text by Juan Carlos Marset, Seville
1997. Excerpt from the text "Signs and
countersigns of Alonso"]
Douglas Gordon
Self-portrait of you + me (Jenny Agutter),
2006
On the matter of privileged or provoked
senses: the work of Douglas
Gordon
Some modern artists understood that
the new creative processes, the socalled
visual arts, could embrace not
just aspects of representation or reproduction
but aggressive and transgressive
attitudes that instead of conserving
the established dispensation led to
its destruction, a radically new possible
form of the ambient reality. Everything
we see is real, but everything that we
convert as such, to which we give new
presence, is also real. This artistic option
makes sense in as much as it offers
real active presences that oblige
us to give them content, meaning, even
though it be unusual, unexpected, on
occasion obliged by the new coherence
that must be ordered from the senses so
that what is presented is accessible to
the intellect. Douglas Gordon is one of
those assaulters of the immediate and
of practice who makes use of time but
also — as in the present case — of fire. A
time or a fire that are controlled, handcuffed,
that suspend their action and
activity when the artist so decides,
which is when he has seen to it that the
observer follows him and not the original
object that motivated the action.
These images thus suspended and interrupted
in time in his other processes,
including the aggressive, lend
themselves, offer themselves to new
functions. The one in the olorVisual
collection goes from being an attacked
photograph, for some subjective reason
or aberrant sadistic game, regardless of
the disfigurement achieved, to take on
a new sense and meaning: the nose has
been altered and at this precise moment
what the image cries out for and makes
manifest is the imperative of smell.
We are then led to wonder — with or
without the consent of the aggressor
— what basic sense he wanted to dispossess
the image of. That of beauty or
that of smell? He has achieved both and
the second to excess, making manifest
the horrific and, for the arsonist, sweet
smell of the fire that burns or the stinking
reek of burnt meat.
A worthy Turner Prize, Douglas Gordon.
[Arnau Puig]
Chema Madoz
S/T, 2001
I suspect that I have always had an innate
capacity to receive smells with a
blurred, diffuse profile, and a marked inclination
to identify one smell in terms
of another, what makes me more than
qualified to smudge an exact cartography
of the territory in which it moves.
Pamen Pereira
Esfera, 2004
The only material of these drawings is
smoke and its trace of soot. The trace
of that smoke takes days to leave me,
that smell is impregnated in my nostrils,
in my hair and in my clothes, and
I would not define it as a perfume, precisely.
It's a complex smell, deep black
and greasy, the smell of something
that has been about to burn but has
not quite burnt, the smell of hundreds
of candles that drip down on me covering
trousers, jacket, glove, hat, floor,
table … objects that later take on their
own entity. It is dense, thick, the very
opposite of the drawings it produces,
light and delicate, more like a Japanese
sumi-e with ink and water than
the catharsis from which they emerge.
I tend to play on the edge, and on this
edge fire, despite its nature, with its
destructive tendency, becomes creative,
but this moment requires full attention,
it takes only a tenth of a second
for everything to ignite and go up
in flames. Paradoxically, the effect of
water in sumi-e is produced here by
fire: the smoke is so penetrating that it
draws by itself, entering through every
possible nook and cranny. Luckily it is
a smell that fades away, while the soot
stays subtly attached, caressing the paper
or the velvet.
David Nash
Wedge Head (Cabeza que asoma),
1994-95
The principal characteristic of this
sculpture is that of a female bust with
the head sunk into the shoulders, as if
hiding in a corner.
The nape of the neck and the throat are
the best places for women’s perfume. It
is there they are mixed with the subtle
aromas of slightly burnt lime wood.
José Luis Pascual
La pipa, 1994
A pipe, which in
our hands is an
extraordinary generator
of dreams…
of smoke!
Fernando Sinaga
Erosión erótica, 2000
The circular rose
Its convoluted and serpentine course
exhaled the narcotic perfume of a
mythical seduction and its skin broken
by desire veiled one night the thorn-covered
path of the labyrinth that opened
the stairway into its center.
Its ethereal, impregnable and brittle
being of electrical vitality offered as
much resistance as a false fortification
and its agonizing blazing beauty poisoned
all thought of permanence, condemning
us to eternal pain after its disappearance.
Now, only in the final anxious urge to
follow the trail of its pervasive sacred
smell will obtain the wound in the crucial
painful side…
Ángela de la Cruz
Tight (Light yellow / yellow), 2015
I always wanted to do a Tight painting
after the Loose Fit series was completed,
which was about putting a large
canvas on a smaller frame - a bit like
skin hanging out when somebody loses
weight very quickly. Tight is the opposite;
the canvas becomes so tight that
it creates tension, and starts breaking
on the sides or wherever it can to find
release. Tight is like a drum, one can
almost play it; or a tight fist; yet it is a
painting and you look at it. It's an unsettling
experience. The colour of it
has to be a very bright, primary colour.
In this case, it is painted yellow and
a paler yellow. Tight is composed of two
stretchers. The larger frame stretches
the canvas, so it can be very tight. I
think all of this work belongs to a Transit
series that I have focused on for 2
years. Each Tight is unique. The work is
as aesthetically pleasing as it is silently
tense.
The smell is part of my work, so you can
feel that is a painting. My studio is full
of strong painting smells and fumes.
For me the studio is like a laboratory
where my work is created. The smell
sometimes is too overpowering for me
so I have to stay away but close enough.
I identify painting with the smell of
paint. I am very interested in every part
of the painting process and the smell is
one of them.
Duane Michals
The candy kiss, 1970
Art is a lie that brings us closer to the
truth, according to Duane Michals. The
appearances, the experiences linked to
his feelings, are the realities he transmits
to us. He works with the invisible,
with abstractions like desire and
dream, just as the creator of essences
does with the smells in his or her olfactory
memory.
Michals plays with memory and time.
The smells that we have registered in
our memory intervene to remind us of
times or moments we have lived.
[Cristina Agàpito]
Ruth Morán
Expansión 7, 2015
Expansion is a piece of research into
space: a physical space and another,
metaphysical space. They are landscapes
that recall geographies, landscapes,
a work that speaks of space and
of non-limit, of colour by way of minute
points and a repetition accumulated in
the manner of a palimpsest.
Smell in unison with colour, at once expansive
and uncontainable, jasmines
with acid nuances, almost edible citruses.
The rose cleanses and purifies,
releases. Smell and colour as emotion,
evocation of the tiny, of the subtle and
fragile. Nature at its maximum expansion.
A song to the senses, a journey.
Expansion is a work that embraces
you, transports you to other places, unknown
… and luminous!
Guillermo Pfaff
Post-form, 2013
At that moment I had already recognised
a number of changes in my body.
In my mind, logical thinking was at
loggerheads with other members. I
would never be so sensitive again but I
thought I would never change. To calm
the momentum, I repeated to myself in
disbelief that things would be forged
little by little and that constancy would
help to materialise my dreams. I intact
the hopes of my childhood kept. I was
living the sweet period when you can
still be almost everything. That summer,
to earn a little money, I went to
work in a paint shop, it smelled of turpentine
and linseed oil.
Robert Pan
XM 3, 5355P, 2010-11
Robert Pan has been working with resin
for fifteen years, creating worlds.
Peter Weiermair calls him an alchemist
of colour, and Danilo Eccher calls him a
poet ‘of the uncertainity of perception
and appearance’.
His artworks are colourful objects, always
the result of an experimental
production process much like that of
creative perfumists in their use of the
chromatic-olfactory palette. And although
Robert Pan’s work is always
formally abstract, it reminds us of macro-
and microshapes in nature, celestial
landscapes or geological structures,
leaving space for the imagination, and
— why not? — prompting our olfactory
memory to begin to remember…
[Bonelli Arte]