Sensual Paintings and Perfumes, Paris Nuit Blanche 2015

I would have loved to have stayed all night gazing at all the very softest of pastel colors Fragonard excelled in his paintings of romantic love and libertinage.  Eroticism in his era was more mentally evocative and veiled, allowing the observer much more freedom to project his/her own sensuality and  erotica, rather than being limited by coarse vulgarity.

The lovely autumn night was relatively young and balmy when I started out towards the Musée de Luxembourg, tucked along the northern edge of the Luxembourg Gardens pass the French Senate. Fortunately the line wasn’t too long  and we were soon inside.

Jean Honoré Fragonard was born on April 5, 1732 in Grasse, where his artistic themes influenced the House of Fragonard, a perfumery house named in his honour.  He was a very prodigious painter until his death in August, 1806, producing over 550 works of art.  The majority of his romantic settings were heavily influenced by his travels and study throughout Italy during his twenties.

His blending of colours is just sublime with absolutely ethereal rich pastels.  His characters all take on cherubic allures with settings drenched with a mystical quality of seduction and romantic love that reigns throughout his work.

The air was already lightly perfumed, as we mingled among many others trying to get closer to the budding perfumers.  Students were from the School of Perfumery in Grasse, France which only admits twelve a year.  They were strategically positioned under the paintings that each was asked to create a composition of scents to interpret each tableau.

I have always been amazed by the talent it takes to become a”nose”, as they are called in the perfume industry.  I can only presume that it must be a very difficult task to assign hundreds of scents to memory and then be able to compose various ones to create a particular perfume.

So of course I was fascinated by these students, and wished I could have spent hours hearing their story about how they became interested in perfumery.  With swirls of people around them, I certainly could not monopolise their time for more than a few minutes, but was impressed with all that they said.

Renato Lupena hails from the Philippines and stated that he had been interested in scents since childhood.  His interpretation of the demoiselle awakening to a new morning, made him think of the citrony smell of magnolias paired with the freshness of green tea.

I was blown away with his aromatic composition, because it indeed carried the cool freshness of the morning air.   Renato explained that he wanted his perfume to be full of  promise as heralded in by another new day.

Then there was George Bowler, from New Zealand, who after being in the fashion industry, went back to study perfume, which was his primary area of interest.  For one of Fragonard’s voluptuous rendering of lovers, he chose the heady sensuality given off by tuberose, as the primary base note of his creation, which perfumers use to create lasting depth that remains detectable for many hours after application.  Top notes are the first scents that you notice.

He talked of the difficulty in creating perfumes  that would capture someone’s initial pleasure and then continue to enchant them with the developing underline scents that can linger for hours.

Marion was a pretty young woman who had the difficult task of coming up with smells evocative of milk. She geniusly chose coconut as the initial of top notes and then used tonka, vanilla and jasmine as her base notes.

Lucus from Spain had a like wise difficult assignment of interpreting Fragonard’s  island of love. He explained that instead of just creating  sea smells, he wanted something more earthy and sensual like musk as he felt Fragonard wanted to portray with all of the greenery around in the background.

Ajit from Mumbai, India had to interpret the manger scene of baby Jesus, which I imagined would  be very difficult to do, except to him.  He masterfully explained that he first thought of powdery or soft baby scents as his top notes and hay, amber, myrrh, and sandalwood as the base notes.

Fulvio from Italy wanted to take us back into a painting depicting a woman being scrutinized by a libertine; primarily using woodsy smells. I tried to take photos of most of the students, but unfortunately because of the lighting, the majority of their faces were too dark to be seen.

Our olfactory sense is said to be one of the oldest in the evolutionary order of mammalian development.  Of all the five senses, it is the only one that makes a direct and undiluted bee line to an area of our brain associated with feelings and memory.

This area of the brain is called the limbic system and is noted to be a storage of emotionally charged memories .The limbic system also modulates our libido and sexuality and colors our mood either positively or negatively.

Women are said to have a larger limbic area and therefore are more gifted olfactory wise of the human species.  Our canine friends , who literally define their world by sniffing, have around 300 million olfactory receptors compared to a human’s puny little 5 million.

If I did not have other spectacular Nuit Blanche event I wanted to catch, I really would have preferred to linger and sniff to my heart’s delight and talk to the student “noses” more, but I knew that there were many others waiting to get in, and left with a promise to return for more heady doses of Fragonard’s baroque eroticism. 

Afterwards I wanted to head north towards the Seine, hoping to catch the coloured light show at the Pompidou Center.  Narrow Rue Sevandoni, looking deserted and softly lit, made for a romantic stroll towards Saint Sulpice whose tall side and back walls were eerily pocked with dark shadows. 

I never fail to be dazzled by the shimmering hues of red, gold and green reflected by the lights while crossing the Seine.

La Tour Saint Jacques towered towards the heavens like an illuminated filigree of ivory against the darkened night sky as I walked beyond Châtelet.

It was already too late to see the lights at the Pompidou, so I walked past Hotel de Ville and BHV and turned left onto Rue des Archives.  The street was literally buzzing with activity and as usual, there were crowds of handsome guys standing in front of an immensely popular gay bar and couples sitting in sidewalk cafés watching passerbys. 

The Cloître des Billettes was formerly a Catholic chapel built in 1294 and is one of only two intact gothic cloisters left in Paris. A hologram rendition of the galaxies centered in the courtyard bathing the medieval gothic arches with clouds of vapors. Earthy and guttural sounds bounced off the walls with intermittent  clashes of cymbals portraying the  birthing pains of the universe.

By the time we exited the cloister, I had developed a longing for Berthillon’s ice cream on nearby Ile Saint Louis.  Crossing back over the Seine on Pont Louis Philippe I noticed a lot of folks milling around the darkened quai below.

Fortunately there was only a short line waiting for one of Paris’s best ice cream.  The Praline lemon and coriander sounded interesting enough and turned to be an amazing blend of flavours!

Satiated and tired, we decided to forgo any other pursuits that would be open till the wee hours of the morning. Walking back alongside of Notre Dame the gargoyles looked mocking and menacing above us.

On the corner of Hôpital Dieu, facing the front of Notre Dame, I caught sight of the wacky yet very ingenious bicycle  man, that I seem to run into every year.  Do not know how he does it, but he has a circulating fountain spouting water between the handlebars and in back, all illuminated with a flag pole decorated with counter-culture posts outlining the plight of endangered poets and artists.

As I rounded the corner of the Marché aux Fleurs, the tiny gazebo looked strangely lonely with hardly anybody in sight.  Cité metro was a welcome sight for my tired but courageous feet that dutifully carries me everywhere in this beautiful city.

Though the quais at Cité were empty, the metro cars roared in packed with fellow night revellers either navigating their way to another museum or event or heading home.  For me, it was another  Nuit Blanche come and gone , and unless you have the stamina to do a complete all nighter, and I didn’t, it is practically impossible to hit all the highlights!