In the state of the flowers my sensibility acts more by image than by smell. The smells that produce most affinity in me are: herbs, trees, mosses, mushrooms, and the organic transformations that the humus performs. One of the ways of catalysing this sensibility is as when my wife and I said: ‘The forest has a smell of mushrooms’. For us, that is plenitude, both olfactory and visual. We can smell and also see how incredible detailed the landscape is in our recollections. All my life I have handled vegetable matter, which amounts to saying that my five senses have acted harmoniously.
There are perfections that can only be deduced by touch, others by sight. All of my work has an opaque sonority. The void disturbs me, it suggests falsity. And I frequently have an imperative need of taste the raw material. It is a way of feeling the aroma in a more visceral way.
Bamboo is a graminacious plant like maize, rice or wheat. I like the smell of straw, the smell of flour worked with water and the smell of new-baked bread. I would like my sculpture to have the perfume of the bread ovens and for its form to suggest all of the wonders with their corresponding smells so as to keep on wanting our daily bread.

Un dulce estremecimiento, una tierna cautividad, así puede ser un olor. Envuelto en sus fragantes redes, es difícil desprenderse de ellas. Porque los bellos olores tienen el poder de atar nuestros deseos, de sujetar nuestra voluntad, haciendo callar nuestras ganas de evasión.

Estos perfumes están ligados de forma indisoluble a nuestra historia, encarcelándonos en la red de nuestros propios recuerdos. Matho, el héroe de Salambó de Gustave Flaubert, experimenta dicha captura: era una emanación indefinible, fresca y no obstante aturdidora como el humo de un pebetero. Olía a miel, a pimienta, a incienso, a rosas y a otro “olor”.

Este perfume firma así definitivamente la pertenencia de Matho à Salambó hasta su muerte.

Zush