Fragrant misdemeanours
By Stéphane Verlet-bottéro, independent curator and cultural coordinator.
traduced from french to english by Lipstick Translations
The work of Boris Raux constitutes an art in itself, and takes the sense of smell as a starting point: a sense that has been neglected, rejected, badly treated. In reverse of
the technological extensions that enhance the perceptible functions of the Cyborg man, olfaction appears to be archaic and animal— superfluous for Leonardo da Vinci, prior to civilisation for Freud, opposed to the other dimension for Lacan. Taking the opposite view or rather to thumb his nose at them all, Boris Raux replaces this obsolete faculty at the heart of a contemporary approach. Iconoclast artist, he creates situations which scramble the senses and provoke disconcerting synesthetic experiences: a staircase covered in Marseille soap which persuades you not to look up so afraid you are of falling, a tent sown up with used sheets where you find yourself nose to nose with the smell of another, an abysmal swimming pool filled with a softener cum odorant mirror, or a monochrome painted with detergent, white as a sheet, the toxic negative of a Soulages.
Boris Raux is a visual artist not a perfumer, as he likes to remind everyone, evoking how Aristotle linked the odour function with that of vision. Formal effectiveness, a mastery of the subject in space, purity of line combined with a multicoloured aesthetic which betrays the palette of marketing campaigns and the multicoloured bludgeoning of supermarkets, these are a few of the ingredients of his polished, lacquered and laconic olfactory installations. But the sense of smell is still the centre of the situation: that it be to dress a portrait, tell a story or to denounce the latest ecological disaster behind obsessional laundering.
Smell as a departure point, as a point of delay: perfume expresses itself a moment after a misty maybe. Fill the moment with fragrances, this is the challenge set out in the work of Boris Raux. His olfactory art is necessarily the art of the event. The artist choreographies both the tangible and immaterial traces of body – human and objects – passing through – the time of a dance, and offers these suspensions of existence to the spectator, an exchange, Methodically, almost scientifically, he recreates an absence, an atmosphere. A fragment of space and time where fragrance is the unit of measure, with a situationist methodology, he also shares the concept of diversion. With the parodic recuperation of products from the consumer society, gaudy and outrageous, Boris Raux sends back the olfactory equivalent of a distorted mirror. His acidulous narratives and his scouring humour are critical of social phenomena and the commodification of the sense of smell.
The language of significant scent substances with which Boris Raux constructs his hermeneutics of the contemporary world is intrinsically performative, in the sense of Judith Butler: the artist creates more olfactory fiction than he represents identities. Baudelaire saw the sense of smell as a lie: “Are you the autumn fruit with sovereign taste? A funereal urn awaiting a few tears? Perfume that makes one dream of distant oases? A caressive pillow, a basket of flowers? The structure of neurotransmitters in association with olfaction is not universal: each spectator perceives this language differently and associates different thoughts and memories with it. Articulating the complex relationships between personnel and community smell show, with Boris Raux, how much the notion of identity is a social construction.
With the series of Olfactory Portraits, the artist puts his nose into the intimacy of daily hygiene. By photographing the bath products of his subject, he brushes a confidential portrait in a familiar environment, while inviting the spectator to ponder on a daily ritual which contributes towards what we appear to be or what we are. Be or appear to be? Domestic or public? Personal or common? Boris Raux skilfully asks these questions and succeeds in revealing without stripping naked, of investigating without transgressing. His compositions act as rights of passage and place their author in the position of a narrator/explorer who reveals a world made commonplace but unexplored and transmits a knowledge which ignores itself, an unconscious that is both individual and universal. In this work of anthropologic enquiry, Boris Raux deciphers everyone’s olfactory codes and intensifies an smelly symbolism systematised by hyper consummation. The immersion of the artist in our bathroom reflects the intrusion of globalisation even into the maintenance of our bodies. By displaying the ceremonial of personal grooming, he caricatures the tension between normalisation and identity. Like all other cosmetics, bath products translate both a standardised market and a process of individuation: I think therefore I am, I feel therefore I exist.
Because it is very much a fleeting sentiment of existence that Boris Raux wants to tell us about in the baroque tradition of the Vanities of the five senses—one of the rare genres in the history of painting which, by the intermediary of tobacco pipes and soap bubbles, the sense of smell figures on the same level as the other perceptions. Over and above the allegory of the brevity of earthly life, Olfactory Portraits share an invitation to contemplation with this type of still life. The impossibility to communicate an olfactory identity by photography exhales the fleeting and inaccessible character, inciting the public to reconstitute their interpretation. The work of Boris Raux is fundamentally dialogical. While appearing to capture evasive symbols, the artist suggests representation trails that it is up to the spectator to follow, armed with his own experiences and olfactory references, He oversteps here the frame of the objective portrait to open up an inter-subjective space, a fiction that every spectator is free to tell. The resonance with our personal olfactory universe sends us back to our own self-portrait. Faced with the work of Boris Raux, we proceed with the unusual exercise of imagining ourselves through the olfactory imprint that we recreate every day: the steam of a shower, the perspiration of a run, the flight of a dance in the breeze of the night.
Odour is a medium that touches our most profound memories and our deep seated urges. Proust wrote “But when of a year past nothing is left, only more fragile, but more hardy, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, the odour and the flavour are still there”. For the exhibition Live In Your Dreams! The representation of the unconscious as an underground world that I commissioned in the crypt of a London church, Boris Raux responded to my invitation with a new version of his Space Divider which played with the Proust idea of the subtlety and tenacity of aromas. With the diffusion on one side of the odour of a cavernous mushroom bed and on the other a hallucinogenic psilocybin, the installation goes beyond its own physical limits to move to the showing. The mechanism polarises the atmosphere in two smelly sub-regions to produce a radical contrast. The empyreumatic emanation of damp mould evokes an old cellar or a secluded grotto, while the suave, acid character of the psychedelic mushroom blows a breeze of intoxicating pleasure and phantasmagorical frenzy. Every breath of air only brings with it an artificial composition, synthesised by a perfumer at the artist’ request—a necessary personal interpretation of an inaccessible olfactory reality, echoing the order of existence defined by Lacan. The spectator avoids undesirable hallucinations, but the heady emanation can cause some dizziness: the effect of the work of art is real. Without ever being an aggression, the process of infiltration spreads throughout the exhibition. The two odours combine very gradually to give a new smelly atmosphere splitting in two the work of the perfumer who created the concept.
Political the sense of smell? Boris Raux invites us to embark on around the world in eighty Ushuaïa deodorants in order to judge. A synesthesic journey that we will not return from unscathed: let’s press the button of the multicoloured aerosol, and here we are sprayed with litchi from Vietmam or vanilla from Polynesia. Decontextualised, the colour stinks and the smell dazzles, this short convolution in the consumer society is an invitation to snuffle around, behind the olfaction, a medium heavily invested by socio-cultural stereotypes and commercial logic. As a private detective the artist want to see and smell the ambiguity of this little known sense. Wrappers off, the synthetic aesthetics of the beauty section puts up a phantasm of nature based on dynamics of economic oppression and ecological destruction. Bourdieu already analysed the habitus of popular taste like the absorption of a collective history - fiction has become reality. Proceeding by minimalist reduction, Boris Raux counter-attacks the dictatorship of “always more” and condenses toiletry products to their absurd perfection. Interventions that make unbearable all these products that the supermarkets try and make so necessary. We have to confront this sisyphean obsession of an asepticised world with an urge for merchandise: the compulsive need to scrub, perfume and recreate natural impressions is in turn becoming suffocating, sickening and artificial.
Olfactory criticism is always perceptible in the work of Boris Raux. Without limiting it to political denunciation or lingering over the nostalgia of a faculty that is repressed and suppressed, his work as an artist is resolutely turned towards the sense of invention and reinvention—constantly— with a sense of play, stories to tell and stages to set.
What kind of smell will he produce tomorrow?