On Smell

‘… but there seemed to be something else besides, something in the garden that gave off a fatally wonderful scent, a scent so exquisite that in all his life his nose had never encountered one like it — or only once before… He had to get closer to that scent.’

‘Again he closed his eyes. The scents of the garden descended upon him, their contours as precise and clear as the coloured bands of a rainbow.’

Perfume, Patrick Suskind

I don’t know exactly what smells looking out of the ‘little window’ evokes in me. In fact, I’ve been using line and colour in a continuous journey through memory, provoking other looks in looks and other images in images.

But there are moments — I don’t even have to close my eyes — when a smell reminds me of a house, a corner of a room, the corner of a table, the rounded profile of a glass, the wrinkles of a bed.

I don’t know if I would know how to go the opposite way. To apply a colour in a painting and, on looking at it, think of smells that produce or produced feelings of joy or sadness, of plenitude or emptiness.

In the infinite chain of sensations, because that what is the process of making and seeing images consists in, I think I can go from a smell to a colour, from a colour to a line, from a line to a space, to a sensation of chiaroscuro to a perfume again: of a flower or of subtle fluids and loves?

Pedro Calapez
February 2000