Urban Scents Launches Olfactory Art Project Cavuspace – WWD
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BEAUTY INDUSTRY NEWS / FRAGRANCE
Urban Scents Launches Olfactory Ar t
P ro j e c t C a v u s p a c e
The Berlin-based fragrance line will hold scented exhibitions and offer regular
per fume-related workshops.
By Susan Stone on September 28, 2016
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The Vulcano limited edition scent created by Marie Le Febvre
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From fragrance creation to marketing, Marie Le Febvre knows a thing or
two about the art of scent. But now, the ISIPCA-trained perfumer is
making a case for the scent of art.
Since launching in 2014, Le Febvre’s fragrance line Urban Scents has
found its home and inspiration in her husband Alexander Urban’s
contemporary art space, Bäckerstrasse-Berlin, a collaboration with an
Austrian gallery sharing the name. Le Febvre’s interactions with
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Urban Scents Launches Olfactory Art Project Cavuspace – WWD
exhibiting artists led to the occasional creation of aromas that played off
and complemented some of the artworks on display.
Deciding to take this creative merger to the next step, Urban and Le
Febvre have renamed the gallery, and re-envisioned it to focus on the
dialogue between perfumer and artist. “The idea is not to do an
interpretation of their work on my own, it is really a combined work,”
explained Le Febvre.
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Now called Cavuspace, named for the aviation acronym for “ceiling and
visibility unlimited,” describing ideal flying conditions, the venue will
present four exhibitions a year featuring Le Febvre’s scents created with
and for each featured artist. The rest of the time, Le Febvre will offer
workshops on perfume, its composition and its ingredients.
The project launched this month with art from French artist Pauline
Bazignan, and her sculptural and painted works.
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For her show at Cavuspace, titled Vulcano, Bazignan presents painted
works of erupting flower forms made by putting acrylic paint on paper,
then spraying it with pressurized water. The process has something in
common with perfume’s ephemeral nature, she says.
“When I work, I make something disappear a little, because when I
paint, afterwards I remove the pigments with water,” said Bazignan,
describing her technique. “So here it is just a memory of the painting
that was before — a trace. I don’t try to make it a beauty or not, I just
remove everything like someone who wants to destroy. It’s like a little
destruction.”
The paintings are paired with ceramics she creates using the peels of
various citrus fruits — from clementines to pomelos — casting their
interiors and burning the skins off to create new forms.
“Her atelier is full of smells, first of all from the citruses, and she was
describing how she loved the explosion of what can be a very aggressive
citrus note,” recalled Marie Le Febvre.
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“And then this smell of the fire, because some of them she even puts in a
fireplace. When we decided to work together she came with this idea of
having to bring a little bit of her atelier into the exhibition place and
that’s how we started to work,” she said.
With Bazignan’s input, Le Febvre created a scent for each aspect — one
with zesty citrus and a bitter tang, the other with a warm smoky
element and the resinous quality of birch tree, Styrax and fir balsam,
meant to evoke trees caught in a torrent of hot lava.
Diffusers placed in the doorways of the CavuSpace exhibition rooms are
programmed to alternate between citrus and smoke, and release the two
scents at varied times.
The Vulcano scent weds the two elements into a perfume, available as a
100-ml. limited-edition of 20, and is priced at 300 euros, or $337 at
current exchange. The glass bottle is engraved with one of Bazignan’s
works, and a collectable print is also included in the packaging. The
exhibition runs until November 12.
In addition to the Urban Scents line, which consists of five perfumes
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Urban Scents Launches Olfactory Art Project Cavuspace – WWD
(priced at 180 euros, or $202) and three scented candles (65 euros, or
$73), Le Febvre also creates bespoke fragrances for around 8,000 euros
($8,929).
Later this year, Urban Scents will launch a sixth perfume. The
upcoming fragrance, Vetiver Réunion, focuses on vetiver grown
exclusively for Le Febvre on Réunion, the French overseas region in the
Indian Ocean.
Le Febvre’s Cavuspace project is just the latest in what seems to be an
ongoing scent art boom in Berlin, with previous offerings coming from
Christophe Laudamiel and Geza Schön.
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