Yurei Nicolas Senegas Lise Pauton Pierre BENARD’s Private collection ©

“Perfumes, colors and sounds”, a saying that I have used for several years to express the idea of an interactive sensoriality that animates OSMOART and which animates me.

Extracted from the sonnet “Correspondances”, this aphorism aspires to the synesthetic poetry of Charles Baudelaire, whose bicentenary we are celebrating.

Through a scented creation, that of a ghost, named Yūrei (literally isolated soul in Japanese), I imagined and designed the ephemeral exhibition “From matter to spirit”.

Through this fragrance, artist-friends joined me through photography, body language, articulated sounds, projections, music, poems …

“A Ghost” is a series of four poems from the “Spleen and Ideal” section, including “The Perfume”, recited by Miku in Japanese for the occasion, listen!

 

untitled Nakano Pierre BENARD’s Private collection

The phantom as an allegory of perfume; impalpable body, this volatile soul is the messenger that comes to our receptors, our emotions, our memories, our memory.

During this exhibition, olfactory origami presented the olfactory decomposition of my creation by offering visitors the accords that constitute it.

The first presented a reminiscence of encaustic, in reference to the technique of ancient painting.

Jacob Collins Seated Nude 2001 wikiart©

An iconic scent based on honeyed notes of beeswax absolute, mixed with the essential oil of maritime pine needles.

A scent that theoretically testifies to an inhabited house.

The second chord levitates around the frankincense (Boswellia sacra), known under the generic name of incense and frequently borrowed by Baudelaire in his verses.

Through this gum-resin, the history of perfumery (the word perfume literally comes from its smoke), like that of humanity, is inscribed.

This mystical material inspires the poet and the nose-creator.

With its universal scent, it pierces all beliefs.

Frankincense is of all cults, it is of all cultures.

Composed only of synthetic molecules, the third evokes the aldehydes and musks of detergents that evaporate on contact with a hot iron when it slides on the shroud.

 

Yurei fragrance Pierre BENARD

The fourth accord of Yūrei refers to the accord of the famous perfumer Sophia Grosjman.

It is known in perfumery under the English words “hug me”, which translates into French as “embrasse-moi”, literally “to wrap in one’s arms”.

A balanced blend that forms the backbone of many of her hits.

Soft and round, it is made from four essential materials in perfumery: hedione, iso E super, a methylionone and galaxolid exchanged with another synthetic musk, phantolid.

Dear readers ! Unfortunately, you won’t even be able to smell my paper and you will only see the specter of this transparent scent, so be it!

The timeless work “The Flowers of Evil” by Charles Baudelaire is a distillate of inspiration.

Kiyomizu no butai kara tobioriruSuzuki Harunobu Source BNF

As Baudelaire, a perfect magician, wrote about his collection, I put all my heart, my tenderness, my religion (transvestism), all my hatred into my perfumes. Each poem in this anthology has its meaning and develops our senses like each matter, each material, each accord that structures a scented composition. With each reading, he inspires us or exhales us, his words are like spirits, olfactory forms in the air we breathe and which let us know that we are alive.

My heart laid bare, I continue to maintain this intimacy with my flower of evil through an emblematic tuberose.

For the perfumer that I am, she represents all flowers.

And, for the man that I am, she represents all women.

My ideal through inaccessible perfections : dreams, desire for elsewhere, art and love cannot discourage my quest with a spleen remover.

Beauty, like a bird’s feather, as light as a butterfly’s wing, hanging from its parasol, has just leapt into the void.

Pierre Bénard, guest contributor

photo by Pierre Benard

Pierre has written four articles for CaFleureBon: Life is a Sliptream of Perfume (2010)  Out of Africa : A Scent (2011) Journey, La Vie en Rose(His Trip to Bulgaria) 2012, Tuberose A Love Story(2012) and Odyssey in the Country of Bergamot (Calabria) 2018. We are honored that he graces our pages with his “perfumes, colors, and sounds”

Note: The Bibliothèque national de France – François Mitterrand is celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of the great poet Charles Baudelaire in the exhibition Baudelaire, melancholic modernity, which is showing from 3 November 2021 to 13 February 2022.

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Photographic credits: Pierre Bénard (use and reproduction prohibited)

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