ROBERTO GRECO RAUQUE

Rauque – the French word for “hoarse” – because like a somnolent voice, I answered with foggy scenes the silences of a daily life that prohibitions let out of breath. January 2021, in my Parisian flat the time was numb, the days uncertain to the point of losing touch with our senses and with the others because they meant danger; in that enclosure I brought spontaneity into play to create a diversion and belie my thoughts. From this introspection – sometimes feverish, sometimes exhilarating, “Rauque” was born: a series of photographs blending suspended compositions and captured portraits. After all, freedom is not asked for, it is searched for and seized like an antidote.

With a glass plate device that dissolves the contours of my subjects, I wanted to engage in a dialogue with absence and presence, indoor and outdoor. The obliteration of the object which, through the viewer’s imagination, takes shape, stimulating peripheral awareness. A struggle then begins between the image and its disappearance.

The image is a flat envelope, not enough for me to fully translate the essence of my allegories. So, since 2014, I’ve been incorporating an olfactory dimension into my photographic series. This allows the viewer to access sensory perceptions additional to those of sight. Thus, “Rauque – L’Objet parfumant” – “the perfuming object” – created in close collaboration with perfumer Christopher Sheldrake, comes to dress, or be dressed by, the photographic series.

“Rauque – L’Objet parfumant” was born from my encounter with perfumer Christopher Sheldrake. We have elaborated the olfactive creation as I was working on my visual creation. Not forbidding ourselves anything, we wanted to be driven by artistic baldness, and if our alphabet was made up of words and images, it sometimes included music and taste as well. « I would like the smell of a body about to implode! » this is how our olfactory exchange started. The waxy basement of a mushroom farm, a doughy Alep soap, a sticky piece of leather left in the back of a stable, the muzzle of a cow, an old box of Japanese incense smelling of ancient and dust, flowers marked by the patina of time or forgotten fruits with carnal accents, we censored nothing to best convey the idea of a feverish body surrounded by sleepy lives. Odd ideas and risky materials abound, but Christopher’s mastery was the safeguard, nothing was to fear, everything would be enhanced.

– Roberto Greco –