For two decades, Belgian artist Peter de Cupere has been using smell as a privileged medium in his work. Painting with scents, creating video and live “perfumances” or building imaginative fragrant installations, he has been exploiting the associative and necessarily subjective impact of smell by combining it with visual images.
Written by eight authors – including the artist himself – this dense, 3-kg book retraces this journey, showing the artist’s research as well as the origins and context of his practice, which remains very particular to this day. Featuring 1,500 illustrations and images and 11 scratch-and-sniff hidden smells, this tome conveys a multi-sensory experience of Peter de Cupere’s work.
Scent in Context: Olfactory Art, Peter de Cupere, Ashraf Osman, Koan Jeff Baysa, Willem Elas, Ruth Renders, Caro Verbeek, Hsuan Hsu, Annelies Nagels, Stockmans Editions, September 2016, 472 pages, €60
This review has been published in Nez, the olfactory magazine – #03 -The Sex of Scent – 2016. This issue is available on www.nez-editions.us for North America and on the Auparfum Shop for other countries.
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