56. JACQUES CAVALLIER-BELLETRUD: A SPACE BETWEEN SYNESTHESIA AND EVOCATION.
A Perfume Atlas - Louis Vuitton - GRASSE.
A Perfume Atlas
‘Perfume is a journey, intimate and motionless at first, an illusion that takes you by the hand to lead you somewhere else, to another emotion, another dimension, a completely different space-time.’ J.C-B.
‘I must have been fourteen when I stuck a blue Dymo label reading ‘osmanthus’ on a flacon, it symbolized for me the other side of the world, unknown lands that I would never visit.’ J.C-B
Pamphlet papers slip through fingers as notes of fragrance glide through the air and vanish into memory - cool to touch and warm to inhale.
Evocative images seemingly slipped between pages - collected as moments of realisation - of breathing in with closed eyes - to be transported in the crushing of a bergamot leaf in the hand to sense the Calabrian landscape - to be surrounded by the dark forests of El Salvadore and taste the scent of peeled bark burning to exude precious resin.
'A fragrance starts off as flowers, seeds, roots or rhizomes generously offered to us by nature, and we try to extract their scents as faithfully as possible. These scented plants flourish in distinctive soils, in various climates, giving them their specific olfactory characteristics' - I have learnt about geography through raw materials.' J.C-B
A Perfume Atlas
Then to the sheets of toothed cartridge signifying a change in terrain and tone, as brushes of illustrated waves of colour break into emotively pigmented studies of abstract expressions - to evoke the gloaming and dawns of distant lands where a harvest of ingredients are painstakingly picked and pressed at precise times of day and season.
Specimen sketches, ombred and floating - as if pressed between diary entries - evoke the plucked state of the article remembered and analysed. Ylang-ylang from Madagascar, Ambrette seeds from Ecuador, Indonesian Clove, Oud Assam from Bangladesh, Sicilian mandarin, Spanish rock rose.
To close the eyes and voyage back to a momentary place, where a stillness of emotion envelopes and evokes a consciousness of peace.
Eyes open and to return to the calm of Monsieur Cavallier-Belletrud's laboratory of memory - a space between the consciousness and the dappled Cézanne impressionistic green of a garden beyond. Collected vials of an assembly of rose petal shades, line deco shelves - casting tiny hues as stained glass in a chapel of science.
A Perfume Atlas
And so the perfume atlas charts an immersive tracery - touched by artisans whose fluency in the art of translating emotion is fathomless. It is in the mystery of the imagination that enables internal doors, closed in the compartmentalization of adulthood - to be reopened onto Rousseau rooms - to tread, barefoot into floors of earth and realise that ceilings are canopies of chorus.
'..in a more democratic and egalitarian light, where everything has its place and a role to play, where the wealthiest continents are not necessarily the ones that produce the rarest scents. This vision upholds the reality that most of these plants no longer grow in the lands where they originated. They have transplanted and acclimatized to foreign settings, where they have achieved their maximum expression.' J.C-B
Louis Vuitton: A Perfume Atlas
Special Thanks: Clara MREJEN and Ines Roger at Louis Vuitton.
Thank you Callum Helcke.