“Your incompleteness completes me”
Asphalt Rainbow is a fragrance born from a fascination with masterful techniques deployed in street art production. There is so much beauty in how a skilled bomber possesses this expert ability to take the simplest everyday things and turn them on their heads – doing so through careful manipulation of an object’s preexisting form and structure. These artists alter our expectations of surrounding space – and yes, a similar phenomenon can be achieved in perfumery.
Join me as I take a closer look at some of the specific street art techniques borrowed in crafting Asphalt Rainbow along with some favorite inspirational moments from the project. First up: understanding subtraction art and crafting an olfactive void.
Subtraction Art
“… I am but a mere shadow of myself…”
[Delete][Delete][Delete] Absence is at the heart of the beauty of subtraction – a form of art that builds upon what’s missing. In subtraction art, it’s all about seeing what you don’t see (or is that not seeing what you do see?). Perhaps the best example of subtraction art is the simple silhouette. One of the earliest forms of portraiture, silhouette drawings and cutouts are made by reducing a person or object to a single solid form and placing it on a contrasting background (subtracting the details). Oftentimes these silhouettes appear in basic black and white. The end result is the production of an anonymous shadowy figure. Through subtraction, we are better able to see the effects of positive and negative space. The construction of these simple silhouettes is itself a fundamental exercise aimed at better understanding the concepts of light, shadow, and contrast.
“My immortal beloved…”
Another great example of subtraction art can be found in the world of jewelry design via the cameo. Like silhouette drawings, cameos feature simplified profile portraits, but here the subject is carved in positive relief, using materials like gems, shells, and stone. Again, the final likeness is presented on a contrasting background. While today mostly worn for decorative purposes, historically, cameos were carried as charms and talismans, sometimes inscribed with magical incantations (to protect, to heal…). Many early Greek cameos depicted famous mythological figures, and were fashioned into rings, brooches, necklaces, and earrings. Notice the particular technical skilled used in carving the relief; how the surface of a chosen material is distressed to give just enough of the appearance of a figure. While more detail on the cameo is visible than in the silhouette (making using of the added benefit of dimensional space), the final representation is still a crude rendering made possible through the use of the implied.
Woman, Old Man, and Flower – Max Ernst (1924)
“We go to a hidden place…”
Subtraction is a technique also heavily favored by artists during the Surrealist Movement. In surrealism, what you don’t see (your subconscious mind) is married to what you do see (your conscious eye), in an attempt to help liberate the human imagination. Surrealism challenges you to question what you know by presenting an obscured “surreal” view of life: a world embedded with secret codes and encrypted messages meant to inspire more thoughtful analysis. Surrealists demonstrate how meaning can be derived through the introduction of missing elements on a page. They ask us to question what we cannot see, and with it, what we do not know – to stretch the boundaries of human understanding. These stunning works of visual and verbal philosophy (like Ernst’s “Woman, Old Man, and Flower”) offer an under-the-hood glimpse into human nature. Inevitably, surrealism’s path of subtraction would open the doors to abstract expressionism, introducing a new crop of artists continuing to seek out ways to defy the bounding restrictions of the expected (a la Jackson Pollock and his emotionally charged splatter canvases). It is here, we turn back to the use of subtraction techniques in street art…
“Resuscitate me.”
In street art, these same subtraction techniques are applied outside. From Suso33’s ghostly silhouettes, to Banksy’s clever stencils, or Vhils’ chiseled visages… these artists challenge our notions of the expected through use of the art of subtraction. In their skillful hands, the scars and wounds of public space are “healed” through art. Shadowy figures emerge from the walls. Relief carvings rise from the cracks. These surrealist outdoor moments aim to toy with the imagination. Through careful manipulation of the space, street artists are asking us to question the relationship between the public and the private… the remembered and the forgotten… the devastated and the deified… to reconcile the world we see with the world we know.
During my time out on the street, I was particularly struck by conversation I had with an artist one late night on Christopher Street [outside the abandoned Badlands]:
“It’s okay. You can say it. Right now that building over there totally looks like shit, and you can almost feel the bad shit that must have gone down inside it. You look at that building and think, ‘She’s damaged goods…’ and I totally get that. People around here give me that same look all the time. But you know what? I don’t see damaged goods. Nah. I just see someone in pain… someone who’s just calling out for some help to heal. And they call me a criminal. That’s the real bullshit. I’m not a criminal. I’m just part of an all-volunteer building healing squad, and my work is severely under-fucking-appreciated.” – Anonymous
Entering the Olfactive Void
“I smell… nothing!”
In perfumery, we subtract to establish the fullness of an olfactive accord. Ask yourself, for your nose to register rose, how true to life does its scent really need to be? How much detail of the flower needs to be defined? One note? Three notes? And how is the ingredient being used in relation to the rest of its pieces? Is it fully realized or simply a fragrant shadow? Subtraction in fragrance helps create nuance. Perfumers are able to trigger a sense of color, detail – even surface tension -all through methods of addition and subtraction. And with a hardline into the brain’s emotional receptors, it is also capable of inspiring introspection on a level that potentially rivals its visual counterparts.
And, of course, subtraction played a crucial role in the crafting of Asphalt Rainbow. We began by reducing the rose to nothing but a shadow accord, leaving us with a simple silhouette of the flower. From there, we started filling back in the missing pieces, but doing so making use of the rose’s overlap with other materials (i.e. the dewy petals crossed with the metallic smell of overflowing city rain gutters, the crispness of the petals with the deteriorating red brick…). Our goal was to establish a new harmonious balance while simultaneously stitching the rose directly into the fabric of its surroundings. In rose reconstruction, we incorporated the olfactive void, using this sense of absence as a key fragrance theme. To better cement our newly developed rose hybrid, contrasting elements were introduced to further distress the rose canvas: subtraction applied in the form of aromatic interference. The final Asphalt Rainbow composition is ultimately an exercise in rose subtraction.
More Subtraction in Street Art
