Amid Paris Art Week’s visual excess, Ann Binlot followed her nose from fair to fête to parfumerie, proving that seeing may be believing, but smelling is remembering.
Of all the senses, smell gets the least credit—even though it can transport us back to a long-forgotten memory, warn us of danger, or summon a feeling we didn’t know we still carried. Yet we live in a world determined to mask its own odours: air fresheners, perfumed candles, deodorants, diffusers. Since art weeks offer more visual stimulation than the human brain can reasonably process, I decided to approach Paris Art Week differently—and report it through my nose.
On Tuesday afternoon, I wandered through the Hôtel de Maisons, the grand 6th-arrondissement mansion once owned by the late Chanel and Fendi designer Karl Lagerfeld, currently the location of Design Miami.Paris. The rain had amplified the garden’s herbaceous scent, and I made a beeline for Sissel Tolaas, the Berlin-based artist and chemist who has spent decades decoding the language of smell. She’s extracted molecules from Balenciaga’s historic atelier to create a couture candle, and sampled dresses from the Met’s collection for Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. Just don’t use the word scent around her—that’s an aestheticised term, she insists, that sanitises the nose’s raw intelligence. “Smell,” on the other hand, “is pure information.”
At Design Miami, Tolaas collaborated with Indian designer Vikram Goyal on what I call a “smellography” (think scenography, but with smells) for The Future Perfect. Their exhibition, The Soul Garden, reimagines Indian fables as bronze animal sculptures—chairs, consoles, and tables embellished with stones. “Sit here,” she told me, pointing to a stool beside a grinning tiger. “This one’s molecules come from tiger urine. It smells like popcorn.” She’d embedded mounds of moss infused with the molecules across the grass. “When it rains, they activate,” she said, pleased, before going into the context of our setting. “A lot of people wear perfume,” she said, nodding to the crowd. “You also smell Chanel No. 5.” She points to Goyal’s other sculptures-cum-design objects. “Elephants have two thousand receptors, while humans only have four hundred. Elephants can smell tiger urine ten kilometres away—they know to run.”
Earlier that day, I’d spent an hour at Guerlain’s original flagship on the Champs-Élysées, celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Shalimar with En plein cœur, a group show curated by Hervé Mikaeloff and Benoît Baume. The exhibition explored love in all its forms: romantic, maternal, erotic, and self-inflicted. Small heart-shaped vessels released fragrances that complemented each artwork. Françoise Pétrovitch’s tender pastel painting of two figures in hoodies leaning on each other was paired with Chrysalide, a genderless cologne by Guerlain’s nose, Delphine Jelk, inspired by the comforting smell of a loved one’s sweater. “When you love someone and take their sweater, it’s so nice to have their smell,” Jelk said.
Across the room, Louise Bourgeois smirked as she clutched her 1968 sculpture Fillette (shaped like a penis) in Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1982 photograph—an image paired with Bourgeois’s own signature perfume, Shalimar, with its sensual blend of patchouli, jasmine, and leather. Nearby, Omar Ba’s Orbite depicted a bride shrouded in a pink flower-print cloth, leaving her family home; Jelk translated its pink florals into Rose Rituel, brightened with lemon and spice. “I wanted to express those red and pink flowers,” she told me, “the colour of love itself.”
In another room, Iván Argote’s bronze Lengua con Lengua showed two tongues entwined mid-kiss. Jelk turned that into Kiss, a metallic, wet fragrance “with the moistness and sweetness of saliva.” Across the gallery, Morgane Ortin’s Amours Solitaires displayed some of the over three hundred thousand love texts she’s collected. “Le plus beau moment était aussi le pire,” read one: the most beautiful moment was also the worst. Jelk’s scent, Larmes, captured the saline ache of tears. “Tears can be joyful or sad,” she said, “so it’s salty, a bit watery, with a muskiness that gives emotion.”
The next morning, I spritzed on Jöklalykt, a limited-edition crisp glacier-inspired fragrance by Icelandic art collective Fischersund for the Icelandic brand 66°North, before heading to Art Basel Paris at the Grand Palais. There, Guerlain appeared again—this time via artist Claudine Drai, who sculpted delicate paper blooms in homage to Shalimar. At the Illy stand, the smell of espresso—liquid salvation during an art fair—cut through the fatigue, and I ordered one while admiring John Armleder’s disco-ball-inspired iridescent cups.
That night, before dinner at Les Antiquaires, I told two friends about my olfactory fieldwork. “I went to Galeries Lafayette and bought Maison Francis Kurkdjian’s Oud,” said New York gallerist Lauren Kelly, offering her neck for a sniff. “I’m wearing Diptyque’s Orphéon,” said Gizem Naz Kudunoğlu, an Istanbul-based curator. Later, at Le Privé, during a party fêting Berlin artist Julius von Bismarck’s exhibition at the Petit Palais, Kelly wrinkled her nose. “It smells mildewy,” she said. “You’re in France,” I replied. “That’s how old cellars in Paris smell.” She retreated to the smoking room while we stayed inside. Who wants to smell like cigarettes anyway? She left as the party hit a 2015-era New York fever pitch—Simonez Wolf at the door and Max Levai playing the generous host.
The following afternoon, I applied Vyrao’s Georgette—a Turkish rose blend for “self-love and enlightenment”—to my neck before heading to La Bourse de Commerce to see Minimal, a Pinault Collection show spanning Lygia Pape’s golden rays to Agnes Martin’s serene grids. Under the cupola, two of Meg Webster’s five sculptures transformed the air itself. “It smells like honey,” one visitor said, noting the curved Wall of Wax (1990). I did the same. Sweet beeswax and honey filled my nose. Next to it, Circle of Branches (2025)—a collage of pine, eucalyptus, magnolia leaves, lavender, rosehips, and holly berries—gave off a verdant, resinous scent. People leaned in, inhaling art.
Friday evening, Viscose and CHERUBY marked the former’s issue 8, SOUND, and the reprint of issue 7, SCENT, with a presentation by Swedish fragrance collective Stora Skuggan at Paris Internationale. With “synaesthesia”—when senses overlap, like hearing colours or, in this case, smelling art—becoming the art world’s favourite buzzword, my Paris Art Week adventure proved one thing: seeing may be believing, but smelling is remembering.
