Charles Rosenberg. Envelopment.

Quilts that do not hang on the wall

Envelopment was Charles Rosenberg's exhibition at IAO Gallery, Los Angeles, from 1 to 28 September 2023. The title has two meanings. In perfume language, envelopment describes the way a scent surrounds the person smelling it. In everyday life, it is the feeling of being wrapped in a blanket.

Quilts usually hang flat on the wall when they enter a gallery, like paintings. Rosenberg did not do that. He stood the quilts up in three dimensional form, so visitors could step inside each work and be surrounded by it.

There are four. Three are wool and cotton, one is wool and silk. Each measures roughly one to one and a half metres per side. Not large. Enough to wrap a person.

From black and white to colour

Rosenberg is a Los Angeles artist with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MS from Bastyr University. His works on paper are geometric abstract collages, and they use only black, white and grey.

The quilts grew from the same geometric abstraction. But they gave him a place to work with colour. And, at the same time, with smell.

His relationship with scent goes back a long way. In the 1990s he worked at Angelica's, a well known herb shop in New York, alongside his collage practice. The two ran in parallel for years before meeting in Envelopment.

He says many smells are sensed synaesthetically: we smell herbs and leaves and see green, or the other way round. He chose each quilt's scent in exactly that way.

Four quilts, four ways to join colour and smell

Verdant Envelopment is green and brown. The greens go with rhododendron, kaffir lime and marjoram. The browns go with oud wood and angelica root.

Blue Envelopment Jalousie is blue and black, its horizontal stripes recalling jalousie blinds. Its scents are lavender, chamomile and valerian, smells often linked with sleep, plus blue chamomile oil for the blue, black pepper and elemi for the black.

Mater-ial Envelopment is dedicated to his mother, Lisa-Clerc Rosenberg, who died in December 2022. Its palette leans pink. The scents are rose, pink jasmine, pink peppercorn and pink grapefruit. Then tobacco and birch tar, from the memory of her perfumed mink coat on evenings at the opera.

Empty Warning, in wool and silk, is dedicated to Conor McTeague, a scent enthusiast. Its layout reverses the usual relation of frame and ground: the patches crowd the edges instead of the centre. And this quilt is deliberately given no scent.

Why it stays

Linking colour and smell is not a new idea. But Rosenberg does it with an object very close to the body. A quilt is not for looking at from a distance. It is for lying under, pulling over, keeping warm. By standing quilts up as spaces, he turns the viewer into the one being covered.

What stays most is how the show moves from rule to exception. The first quilt follows the logic of colour and scent. The second adds the idea of sleep. The third lets memory break the rule. The last drops scent altogether. Four steps, from system to absence.

Envelopment belongs to the Institute for Art and Olfaction's line of exhibitions where smell sits beside crafted objects and personal stories, as in the group show Storycraft. Here the story is stitched into fabric, piece by piece.