A few years ago I took some hiking routes through a forest that dates from pre-glaciation times and which managed to avoid the ice and conserve its endemic flora.
Being a person without special olfactory sensitivity, however, I was surprised by the smell of this forest, which evoked remote times where humans still had to hide at dusk, and keep their eyes and nose attentive in case a predator appeared. Although really that mental image was a product of a manufactured nostalgia, linked to a romanticization of primitive communities, in supposed communion with nature.
In this work, fragments of a strange arcadian scene inhabited by plants and animals, among them hominid-looking beings, are represented through the drawing. This image has been covered in raw encaustic, which gives the patina of beeswax.
A smell can evoke memories of the past. But memory is fickle and all too often relies on the restructuring and reinvention of stored information. To what extent can a scent retain that memory intact? Is it hopelessly destined for the idealization dictated by our brain, in the same way that our collective past is mythologized?