the Art of Collecting: Ernesto Ventós. colección olorVISUAL

It is almost forty years now since this atypical collector that is Ernesto Ventós commenced the colección olorVISUAL, not with the aim of putting together a hoard of artworks of any particular style, theme or generation, but prompted by an intense interest in finding creations that would stimulate the olfactory memory. His is, then, a collection composed of pieces from a whole range of artistic disciplines: painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, video art, installation … that can be classified as figurative, abstract, surrealist, expressionist, conceptual … while responding, all of them, to the same purpose: to provoke, in themselves and the by way of the texts that accompany them, a sharpening of our sensory capabilities as viewers and the activation of our own olfactory memory.

And it was with this idea in mind that we have chosen from so large a collection 11 works which are not tied by any relations of a generational, material or technical nature but nevertheless, in my opinion, make perfectly evident the challenge that Ernesto Ventós set himself when he began the colección olorVISUAL, while at the same time letting us see how right Umberto Eco was when he said that the work of art is an opera aperta, which each of us can read and feel from multiple registers, and in so doing enrich our intelligence and our sensibility.

Daniel Giralt-Miracle
Curator of the exhibition