[LUM#4] The museum gets into the swing of things

[LUM Magazine] - Published on March 7, 2017 in Art & Culture, Career Guidance Internships Jobs, Science-Society

Using perfume to create a link between a painting and museum visitors is the challenge taken up by students from the Faculty of Science. Or when art meets science, much to the delight of the public.

It is a seascape like thousands of others, one illustration among many of a theme dear to the golden age of Dutch painting. At first glance, there is nothing particularly original about this work immortalizing the return of fishermen on a calm morning on an anonymous coastline. On closer inspection, however, the scene is not without charm, with its captivating light, its skillfully orchestrated play of light and shadow, its golden brown sand plunging into translucent waters... And then there is the sky, omnipresent, which is difficult to interpret as either heralding the onset of a storm or the return to calm after a night of heavy weather.

This scene, taken from a painting on wood by Wilhem Van Diest (1600-1678) , was one of several works from the Fabre Museum that formed the basis of a project led by studentson the Master's degree course in Cosmetics, Flavors, and Fragrance Engineering. Their challenge was to recreate the atmosphere of a painting through a fragrance of their own creation. For Julia Prats, who worked with three of her classmates on "Marine par temps calme" (Sea in Calm Weather), the difficulty lay in avoiding the pitfall of an overly literal interpretation: "We didn't want to create something that was too marine, too salty..." she explains.

Cotton-soft atmosphere, sunny notes and warm sand...

“We sought above all to convey the cottony atmosphere of the sky, the contrast between the transparency of the water, the heavy, humid mood of the painting, but also its very airy dimension, which inspired a sunny note in our composition.” There is undeniably poetry in this way of probing the soul of the work, in this way of evoking "the smell of warm sand" that Julia Prats talks about. The student acknowledges that the creative process was "less methodical than creative."  But chemistry is never far away. It was through a clever combination of synthetic materials that these apprentice perfumers managed to give the work its olfactory identity. "Once the desired note was obtained, it had to be adapted, put into a solvent, with a particular constraint due to the fact that the fragrance had to be diffused into the space..." continues Julia Prats.

Presented during the Fabre Museum's student night, their fragrance also allowed a specific audience, the blind, to enter the world of painting. With resounding success."We asked them to describe what they felt based on the scent, and thanks to their senses and highly developed imaginations, some were able to describe the painting in detail..." says the student, who has since moved to Grasse, the capital of perfumery, to pursue what is perhaps the most delicate of scientific professions.

Keywords: Art and culture, Students, Training, LUM#4, LUM Magazine, Science