THE SMELL OF THE PAINTING
Starting from the idea that smell can be converted
into painting, in a displacement of the function and the
sense, I set out to reproduce this shift –
or un-framing – in the scope of the convention
of visual art. Smell, impossible to tie down with colours
and forms, was a suitable material to accommodate the
contrast: painting without colour, writing without sound,
subjecting things to the ambiguity of smell, and in this way transmuting them to the point where they forget that they are actual things and stick to evoking the function they have. Painting smells was, then, like talking about painting.
Jordi Alcaraz
Calella, October 93