From 21 April to 27 November the Es-senze exhibition will be staged at Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice .

Smells and perfumes cause such a variety of sensations that often there is no means - words, images, gestures - to describe them. They testify to past feats, evoke never dormant emotions, recall facts, people, things still alive in the most secret memory of each of us. At the same time, they can do the opposite, giving voice to the unspeakable, describing the ineffable, materializing the incorporeal. For this reason some visual artists rely on them to express what sometimes appears otherwise unspeakable. They are authors of different generation, culture and syntax associated, however, by a common orientation that leads them to explore, each in their own way, an alternative creative dimension to the usual ones: the adoption of smell and the sensorial components related to it.

Es-senze explores this trend by proposing a selection of these interpreters to highlight the most indicative aspects of the phenomenon and highlight the multiplicity of aspects that characterize its development. These are some of the most significant exponents of the contemporary creative scene whose works, distributed in the rooms on the first floor of Palazzo Mocenigo , give life to an unprecedented olfactory journey, a multisensory journey through which you can virtually immerse yourself in their reflections, usually explained in other form: plastic, pictorial, graphic or installation. And, as if art ideally managed to emanate its own perfume, the works on display will envelop the viewer in an extreme variety of fragrances with equally heterogeneous tones, as many as the sensations they are able to evoke.

Without any ambition to be exhaustive, the exhibition, curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto, intends to open an initial passage in a research area that has not yet been investigated, at least according to the parameters adopted in this circumstance. In fact, if there are various artists who in different eras and with equally different languages have ventured to give body and visibility to the concept of perfume, much less are those who have taken perfume as the raw material of their investigations, treating it on a par with other systems. expressive like painting, sculpture, drawing. The exhibition, therefore, aims to throw a first glance at the work of the latter, presenting some of them for illustrative purposes, taking the form of a preliminary project, with an experimental character, open to possible, wider developments.