Over the years Tillmans’s photography has addressed a wide range of genres and contents, often including the portrait. Taken as a whole, his artistic practice leaves us with the idea of an extensive work in progress whose driving force is a constant questioning and recontextualizing of all the constituent elements of photography. It is not surprising, then, that the work entitled Anders, Brighton Arcimboldo should have been inspired by the painting of the great Mannerist artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

The relationship between man and his natural environment and the senses involved in that relationship were recurring themes of the Mannerist art of the second half of the sixteenth century. But Arcimboldo’s work has in its poetics another mechanism that points directly to the Baroque and makes it even more interesting in Tillmans’s eyes: the perpetual combination of its constituent elements, which in itself ensures an infinite number of possibilities.

If we look at the relationship between the olfactory sense and the works of Arcimboldo, there is undoubtedly a direct connection … and Tillmans’s work: does it smell?

Christian Domingez