One day, going through a book on Flemish painting, I was struck by The Sense of Smell, a painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens. The work is part of a series on “The Five Senses”, which Brueghel painted in 1617 and 1618 in collaboration with his friend Rubens, who executed the allegorical figures.

 

The series may have been commissioned by Infanta Clara Eugenia and her husband Albert of Austria, rulers of the Southern Low Countries, for whom Brueghel worked as a painter. 
 

In 1636 all five paintings became part of King Philip IV’s collection and were placed in a room with ebony and bronze bookcases, exhibited along with works from Dürer and Titian.

 

One of the most appreciated and prolific painters of his day, Brueghel worked, among others, for Federico Borromeo, who wrote that the artist’s paintings reflected the beauty and variety of nature. His work is characterized by genres such as still lives of flowers, allegorical and mythological scenes, and representations of Paradise. Once he said that he took a long time to finish his paintings because they included flowers that bloomed at different seasons of the year. 

 

On several occasions I went back to see The Sense of Smell in my book on Flemish painting and found that each time it offered a special interpretation. Not long ago I visited Madrid’s Prado Museum to see such monumental work in person. As a matter of fact, it seemed natural to see the painting in person to gain a better understanding of it beyond its existence as an object. At that time I felt that “when we look at a work of art, it also looks at us in a mysterious way", as writer and critic Pablo Gianera said. According to him: “The artistic experience consists in the contemplative illusion that something or someone is looking at, listening or speaking to us, secretly, from behind a work of art, because contemplation is not only visual, but also auditory.”

 

At the same time, each work can sustain meanings that are foreign to the author's own; and few coincide. They are all colored by personal experience. I then decided to draw inspiration from Brueghel's work, especially from those flowers and plants that convey a mysterious empathy to us, to create a series of images according to my own interpretation. The water, the glass, and the incidence of light in the photos try to recreate the spirit of the paintings of Brueghel's time, in which oil was used ─a material that facilitates transparencies, reflections, effects of light and shadow, and a special atmosphere. As writer Salvador Elizondo once said: “Paintings have no audiences, they have gazes.”