Alessandro Piangiamore. Primavera Piangiamore.

The smell of strangers

In 2014 the Palais de Tokyo in Paris gave part of Les Modules, a programme supported by the Fondation Pierre Bergé Yves Saint Laurent, to the Italian artist Alessandro Piangiamore. Born in 1976, he lives and works in Rome. The curator was Daria de Beauvais.

The central project of the show was Primavera Piangiamore. It began with a request: a number of anonymous strangers agreed to give the artist their smell, meaning the perfume they wore. Those smells were gathered and mixed into a shared scent that none of them had ever worn.

This detail matters. Once the private smells are mixed, no donor can find their own part again. A person's smell is a mark of identity, like a voice or handwriting. In this work that mark dissolves into a crowd. What remains is not a portrait of anyone, but a portrait of giving something away.

Then the scent went into glass. Not into a bottle with a cap. Into the glass itself, in a sealed cavity with no way out.

A thousand degrees

This is harder than it sounds. Sealing glass takes a temperature close to 1000°C. At that heat any liquid evaporates instantly. Piangiamore turned to the technical knowledge of glassblowers to seal the perfume cavity without the perfume disappearing.

The final shape of the sculptures was also entrusted to the glassmakers' skill. They are organic in form, closer to something grown than something cast. According to the Palais de Tokyo, the extreme heat is exactly what keeps the scent from evaporating and makes it imperceptible from outside.

The result is a sculpture of smell that cannot be smelled. Visitors stand before a transparent object, see the cavity, know that inside is the scent of many strangers. And that is all. The work asks the viewer to imagine rather than inhale.

Olfactory art usually tries to bring smell closer to the viewer: diffusers, closed rooms, scented materials. Piangiamore goes the other way. He sets an impassable wall between smell and nose, then tells the viewer the smell is right there, a few millimetres away.

Wax from the churches

In the same show Piangiamore placed the glass pieces beside the series La cera di Roma: panels coated in wax from votive candles collected from the churches of Rome.

Each votive candle is a plea from someone unnamed. People light it, let it burn and leave. The wax that remains is the trace of those pleas, blended together like the smells in the glass. Candle wax has a smell too, warm and slightly smoky, familiar to anyone who has stepped into a small church. Wolfgang Laib once built a whole room of beeswax for visitors to walk into that smell. Piangiamore keeps the wax as a flat, quiet surface.

Side by side, the two series speak of the same thing: anonymous traces of many people gathered into one object. One keeps a smell by locking it away. The other keeps prayers through what is left after the flame goes out.

Primavera Piangiamore stays with us because it asks a question rare in olfactory art: is a smell that no one can smell still a smell? The work answers by not answering. The smell is still there. It simply no longer belongs to the air.