With The Images of Perfume, Matteo Fumagalli takes readers on an evocative journey to discover the power of fragrances.
“The perfume and I have been a married couple for many years. A bond that develops in three phases. At the beginning there is a strong attraction and there are intense emotions: everything is exciting and new, like the top notes. Then, as the years pass, the heart notes arrive, which are enriched with affection, trust and shared memories and become the essence of a life together or of a family. Finally, the trail left after so many years becomes security and union, until it becomes one. As that song says, It Had to Be Youa great jazz classic written by Isham Jones and Gus Kahn: it was destiny between us”, explained Matteo Fumagalli, 34 years old, author of The images of the perfumepublished by L’Ippocampo Edizioni with drawings by Daniele Catalli. Head of communications and professor of cinema history, Fumagalli, over the years, has developed, on his social channels, a dissemination path dedicated to the world of perfumes and books, showing how these universes are, in reality, more linked than ever. There is nothing smooth or too predictable in his art: the remedy he knows against the excesses of reiteration is improvisation. The scents that capture him seem to be made of the same material as dreams and memories, destined to transform into desires or impulses. Ultimately, the dreamlike territory he travels through is the same one that fuels his love for cinema. His work, rather than a defined style, allows us to glimpse the strength of the multiple forms of emotion. Emotions invade the gaze, occupy it and seduce it. “In the office,” Fumagalli continued, “they renamed me Perfume Effect. My book is not an archive: it is a refuge, but also a path of escapism. It all depends on the single scent that comes my way. There are haughty and unapproachable perfumes, others that instead communicate a desire for sociality. There are perfumes that evoke closed and oppressive environments, others instead endless landscapes. Happy and lively perfumes, but also sad and decadent perfumes. There are perfumes that impose protagonism on the wearer and others that signal the desire to remain behind the scenes. Perfumery can potentially evoke any type of sensation.” And it’s not even a nostalgic revisitation, “I have never relied on recurring logos or themes in the search for the perfect fragrance. For me it was important to support a thesis: perfumery offers infinite possibilities. There is a perfume for every need and for every evocation. I worked on four antithetical but complementary pairs, such as Yin and Yang. Some are more easily attributable to perfumery, such as Eros, but also Landscape and the world of Memories. Others are less immediate, like Thanatos,” continued the author, “I enjoyed playing with contrasts and surprises. Even those worlds apparently so rooted in perfume, such as Eros and the universe of seduction, I wanted to tell them at 360 degrees, going beyond easy stereotypes. Because the universe of eros, even if it is often always narrated in the same way, is complex and multifaceted.” Very lucid in analyzing the evolution of his relationship with perfume, Fumagalli concluded, “I have always associated the visual with the world of fragrances. Since my first perfume, in pre-adolescence: CK One by Calvin Klein. I chose it for the imagery it built, the post-grunge one heroin chic of advertising campaigns with Kate Moss. As I grew up, I then chose perfumes belonging to the fashion imaginaries closest to my sensitivity: Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto. It is precisely through these creations, in particular Incense Avignon of Comme des Garçons, that I understood how the synaesthetic associations between perfume and images are absolutely natural. I’m living a beautiful love story with perfume and cinema. I work as if it were always the first time. I remained that child who enters a cinema theater for the first time. And I have a lot of fun.”
