Dressing The Air is the brainchild of the London-based artist Paul Schütze.

In a career spanning 30 years, Schütze has exhibited his photographic and installation works in galleries and museums around the world, released over thirty albums of original recordings, scored a number of films and performed numerous concerts. He has collaborated with artists such as James Turrell, Josiah McElheny and Isaac Julien and musicians as diverse as Bill Laswell, Raoul Björkenheim, Toshinori Kondo, Lol Coxhill and Jah Wobble.

Dressing The Air is a unique open resource that aims to enrich creative thinking by encouraging a multi-sensory approach. A constantly evolving archive and creative news feed, Dressing The Air monitors and reports on a diverse range of art-forms from cinema to sculpture, painting to furniture design, land-art to perfumery.

dressing the air: the bureau of sensory intelligence

a creative resource to provoke and inspire

Black
Puredistance

10/12/13

Black

When perfumer Antoine Lie made the emphatically provocative Secretions Manifiques for Etat Libre d'Orange, he demonstrated a keen sense of olfaction-as-event, even as violence. Here, under what I can only imagine were very particular instructions, he has shown a prodigious ability to imbue perfume with behavior. Describing Puredistance Black is like describing something sentient. It coils discretely against the wearer's skin, shifting postition and weight as though judging balance. Every so often a "layer" unwinds, refreshed and languid, flirts with the air and dissolves like light on water. The darkening, green-tinged presence, flickers between a resinoid chill and the living warmth of some infinitely refined animal with skin like translucent suede and breath smelling of bruised, unknowable blooms. A rare flash of olfactory brilliance.

Puredistance
"Most perceptual qualities that we can discriminate are olfactory perceptual qualities. There are more than one trillion discriminable olfactory stimuli."
- Andreas Keller, 2016, Philosophy of Olfactory Perception