La douche froide
from December 5th to March 30 2015
Solo show
at the International Perfume Museum
Grasse FRANCE
La Douche Froide, can be experienced as an attempt to reconcile the clean body and the essential body.
What constitutes our body? To be more specific:
What forms our body smell?
Starting to question of the Body through an invisible medium as smell does not generate lacks. It is the opposite. The formulation becomes (maybe paradoxically) more substantial and more realistic: entirely more complex.
Waving layer to layer – from the most superficial and common layer represented by the world of cheap deodorants, to more epidermal and intimate layers that can be aroused by confrontation with a foreign body – we are not looking for answers in the show, but rather to giving form to this question.
In any event, we are invited to adopt the central posture of a body that acts and criticises what is around us.
The contact is inevitable.
Close or distant?
Hand-to-hand or with love?
Accepted or inhibited?
With oneself or with another?
Socialized or essentialist?
Fantasized or biological?
The question of the body infiltrates everywhere, in particular through one of its most evanescent and apparently non-bodily characteristics: its smells.
Boris Raux
About LA DOUCHE FROIDE,
Echoing the summer exhibition of Baths, Bubbles and Beauty, which enabled the inhabitants of Grasse and many tourists from around the world to discover the history of hygiene from the eighteenth century to today, the International Perfume Museum rounds out the year with a surprising exhibition of contemporary art. Boris Raux, a visual artist who focuses his work on the sense of smell, was given free rein to create works in various areas of the museum and propose an original pathway.
Raux toys with an obvious visual seduction, but one where humour subtly upsets a first impression of works that are purely decorative or overly immediate. His installations, which can be monumental, offer spectators an olfactory experience that we can qualify as total. All five senses are called into play so that visitors participate physically in the exploration of their own natural smells, as well as artificial ones. For Boris Raux, although smell is an individual and personal marker, it is also a societal phenomenon. Focusing on the sense of smell, his world is that of a humanist. And, through a process of accumulation and the repetition of everyday objects related to cleaning and cleanliness, he organises, with curious effectiveness, a recurrent abundance of ready-made objects, a final chaos and an individualisation through smell that seriously calls into question the commonplaces of our consumer society.
This exhibition dedicated to contemporary creation is a first that falls within the approach adopted by the International Perfume Museum since its reopening in 2008. This approach consists in building an ambitious collection of contemporary works, most notably featuring Jean-Michel Othoniel and Gérard Collin-Thiébaut. For my first exhibition since my arrival in October, I am therefore very pleased to be able to propose for the winter season the work of visual artist Boris Raux. Starting with smell, he elaborates a visual opus that calls on all our senses and invites us to meditate on our individuality and its fragile position in our society.
Olivier Quiquempois
Heritage Curator, Director of the Museums of Grasse
