An avant-enfleurage, as this molting includes the aeration, the distillation, the fume, the heir-haunt of scent. Setting the air ablaze in profound strokes whilst sitting next to air that was huffed without intention. Eugène Atget’s camera sucked in the ancient dust hung with fresh vegetation and lay it with precision chemical gush- es on to glass negatives. To print these flashes, he bathed the beauty-filled images in bathes of collodion, puffing out alcohol and ether fumes. 

Rainer Maria Rilke upon setting foot in Auguste Rodin’s studio described it wittingly as ‘heavy plaster dust like a blinding snow.’ The master of marble chipped with force at all matter of materials to meet their ends. He shattered plaster with its chalk dry heaviness that cluttered breathing to create a mold that would end in bronze with its metallic noose of smooth permanence. 

Not unlike Vesuvius staging its monumental charge of fiery volcanic ash, with enough volume to consume two cities and a civilization in hours. The buried pillars of azure eclipsed by the carbonized bodies crawling from the hot ghost. The architecture of the damned uncovered is standing in pieces bound to eternity in volcanic layers that have invaded every crack of every surface. What once stood as a pantheon of life and grace is now a black shroud of ash cornering every memory. 

Born out of a conceptual longing to capture the ephemeral nature of scent, Jana Sterbak created ‘Perspira- tion: Olfactory Portrait’ in 1995. She designed a clear glass shaped lung with a crimson glass plug that sealed in a hard-won synthetic imitation of a particular human’s scent she wished to memorialize and memorize. This grand effort is perhaps one of bewilderment as in its distinct conclusion that human scent is truly fleeting and inimitable making it ever so precarious. Sterbak defines our deep attachment to this sensory action that is capable of making us remember another in frustrated fragments. While a melancholic breath is heaved that we cannot make scent our prisoner, the true height of its meaning is realized. 

Ana Mendieta is an artist still yet of mythical conceptual proportion, and she falls into the realm of employing scent as an aesthetic partner as fact not as a directive. She took on an unbound series of works whereupon the outline, or silhouette of a female form is made of wood and burned at sea as an elegy. The fuming representation of memory fills our head with the ancient use of fire while simultaneously destroying a form in restless candor. In another work, she delicately arranged deep red blooms in the sand in the form of a strewn out body. The stunning floral blooms echoed their fragrance through musty sand and salted air. In the end the water washed them away in their entirety proving again, the language of ephemeral loss is unending. 

In 1716, painter Marco Ricci used gouache applied in strong strokes to tanned leather to depict the crashing sea as he had witnessed. By painting on a live skin which he likely chose for just that, its liveness, he intro- duced the idea of an almost breathing form of painting as gouache as a material is soft and oiled, when mixed with the smoky leather it created a new material entirely. This effort at a material gesture to describe the ocean speaks to the effect of its weight in mien and in reality. 

The language of scent in art has a history as long as it is complex, in the same language though there seems to be a very plain note of a desire to integrate the authentic layer that exists in our every breath. Our life is set to scent and these formalist examples give way to an understanding of how it functions and longs.