Interested in what was ten years ago unchartered territory, Boris Raux seeks to understand the world and our way of living through the prism of olfaction. Not content with the label “olfactory art”, he prefers to talk about an olfactory dimension within contemporary plastic arts. His work, which borrows from art history in its forms and references, can be read at di erent levels with smell being only one point of entry.
Boris Raux redesigns existing olfactory forms starting with everyday objects such as functional products, ready-made smells that he selects according to what they represent in society. Thus, he works towards a kind of sociological study, both scientific investigation and political engagement. He exhibits shower gels and shampoo in an aesthetic laboratory in La Collection, and hisEpitheliums displays coloured sculptures which open like strange fake owers. Humorously playing with marketing narratives, his Tour du monde (World tour) uses 80 deodorants by French brand Ushuaiha to take us to the height of synthetic exoticism, while his work with detergents speaks of everyday pollution. But he also knows how to personalise his gaze which seeps into the intimate, without ever crossing into voyeurism, the bodies remaining absent. His still-life series Portraits Olfactifs constitutes images of the products which make up every person’s olfactory aura. La fabrique des gisants, gelified baths in which bodily residues are captured, challenges, he says, “the pressure of bodily construction in society”. Seeking to confront the alterity, he also invites the public into his personal space with Latent(e), a tent made out of sheets from his marital bed, and La fin de journe?e (End of the day), a pile of worn T-shirts fashioned into a sculpture of his own odour. Boris Raux does not believe in the autonomy of smell, but instead sees it as a potential intermediary space, something he describes as a “place for sharing our intimate and personal fictions”.
Clara Muller
Writter for NEZ, Art Historian