Boris Raux. FLAIR FLERS

Boris Raux
FLAIR FLERS

Wanting to understand a city from the inside means trying to touch the individual within a community, it means opening the habitat to the city. Coming to a residence is an opportunity to walk through the city with your nose straight ahead. Knocking on doors, entering, smelling the atmosphere, meeting people and then leaving. In the end, it's a look at a city through its singular smell. A work carried by the hope of touching a bit of its essence. I hope to understand its inhabitants by drawing their portrait and open up a memory, a collective identity.

An olfactory chronicle of society.

Smell is the main tool of my plastic research.

I invest the field of politics and art through our olfactory universe in order to build over time an olfactory chronicle of society.

Our olfactory universe is a formidable point of entry into our society. Smell betrays our unconscious, guides our behaviour, reveals our intimacy...

Fleeting but omnipresent, its imprint can be felt everywhere. We can look away, not listen, avoid contact; but to stop smelling is to stop breathing and therefore to stop existing. The smell overwhelms us. Between materiality and invisibility, it successfully cultivates the blur. A sense of the non-verbal, it opens our imagination and sketches out a perception of abstract feelings.

Working from our olfactory universe means approaching and appropriating our daily reality differently.

As odours plunge us into the realm of the impulsive, the old fantasies of collective manipulation are reawakened. Our industrialised society is nowadays all perfumed. It plunges us into the artificial. Our olfactory reference points are different. We are entering the era of olfactory marketing in search of sensationalism that seeks to lure us. Obviously, our unshakeable faith in our free will seems to be well established and we are not ready to be led by the nose. Many of my installations challenge these certainties: they function like traps where everything seems very attractive at first glance. I exploit as much as I play with the market. Cultivating this ambiguity, I try to give an impulse without falling into indoctrination.

Like the smell, my approach is essentially one of infiltration