In 1978, Ernesto attended an exhibition at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, Olfactive Suggestions, and encounter that gave him the idea of starting his own art collection, thereby creating Ernesto the collector.

Ernesto was a very untypical buyer of artworks in that he did not limit himself to selecting pieces that he liked at first sight, but looked instead for those that awakened some olfactory memory. He would stand in front of a work that appealed to him, observing it closely, and if it provided an olfactory stimulus, he would remark that ‘this work has a smell’. Ernesto exercised his capacity for synaesthesia by relating the perception of the art object to the smells in his memory.

Out of this whole process, an art collection unlike any other in the world was born, in which each of the pieces has a specific olfactory note designed by the perfumer. The notes range from smells reminiscent of perfumes, by way of everyday smells, to unpleasant odours that we may even find disgusting.

The collection is so special that the artist Joan Brossa once said to him, approvingly: ‘I make visual poetry and you make visual smell.’ Ernesto found this idea so exactly right that he decided to call his collection the colección olorVISUAL.

Artist

Of course, the use of the sense of smell continued to be the primary impetus behind all of the new artist’s actions. Ernesto took the message of ‘teaching to smell’ as his banner and decided to focus his work as an artist on his most essential medium: THE NOSE.

This was how NASEVO came into being (the name combines the Catalan word for a nose, NAS, and EVO, the initials of Ernesto Ventós Omedes) and with it, an explosion of noses. Big noses, small noses, noses in a thousand colours, paper noses, wooden noses, painted noses, moving noses, noses with lights, noses on bodies, changing noses… And even a car turned into a nose.

NASEVO transformed objects and materials into noses, since the nose is the organ that allows us to capture reality in the same way as he did: through smell. In the creation of his works, the artist no longer had to assign an olfactory note to each piece, because now it was the creation itself that responded to the olfactory accords that NASEVO had in his mind.

Perfumer

His inclination and natural interest in the world of scent led him to begin a serious study of perfumery, guided and accompanied by great masters of the sector such as his father (Ernesto Ventós Ravetllat) and the prestigious perfumer Arturo Jordi, with whom he worked as an assistant in Grasse (France) and in Geneva.

While still very young, he joined the team at the distillation firm founded by his grandfather Ernesto Ventós Casadevall in 1916, which duly evolved into two major companies with an international presence in the sector: Ventós, S.A., dedicated to the sale of raw materials, and LUCTA, S.A., dedicated to the manufacture of fragrances, aromas and nutritional additives for animal feed.

Ernesto developed rapidly as a professional, becoming a first-rate perfumer and an outstanding businessman, partly due to his excellent training but, above all, thanks to his exceptional ability to smell and his genuine talent for understanding the world through his nose.

Above and beyond his professional career, Ernesto was a person with a restless creative spirit and qualities that led him to an immediate engagement with the world of art, in which he began to be fully involved, forming fruitful relations with artists and gallery owners.

Out of this whole process, an art collection unlike any other in the world was born, in which each of the pieces has a specific olfactory note designed by the perfumer. The notes range from smells reminiscent of perfumes, by way of everyday smells, to unpleasant odours that we may even find disgusting.

The collection is so special that the artist Joan Brossa once said to him, approvingly: ‘I make visual poetry and you make visual smell.’ Ernesto found this idea so exactly right that he decided to call his collection the colección olorVISUAL.

Ernesto’s inclination for art continued to grow over the years, and his restless spirit was not content with simply acquiring art. The perfumer was keen to explore his most creative side, and felt that it was time to do so by giving form to his own works of art.