Un Jardin à Cythère by Hermès (2023)
Un Jardin à Cythère achieves an oleaginous quality thanks to the smooth savoury-herbal green of pistachio, which swells and then mellows as it mingles with the deeply fruity and ripe undertones of olive wood – itself spicy, even piquant, yet always fresh. This is an elision of fragrant gestures that create the singular smell of Castile soap. A salubrious unguent, it is a solar exhalation in a Mediterranean dialect. It is a precise memory of Greece – highly particularistic, and yet set against an easily decipherable background.
The work is precise, painterly, and expressive. Its chromatic tones are unusual, slightly flat and weathered, and its potential banality is saved by sparks of yellow and orange citrus fruits, playing out in charmingly twee fashion. It is minimally beautiful because it follows a fairly legible pattern of expression, and in consequence, it becomes a work intent upon achieving proportion and clarity.
Photo by Hermès
Insofar that beauty is an aesthetic demand, as a ‘thatness’ [quod] of the entity – to be present but not obvious – this is equally Cythère’s downfall. At times its aspects are immobile to the point of stiffness, despite its ability to place me against a wall of creamy smell with a soothing symmetry. In this gardenscape, the leaves on these trees and plants and these grasses and grains neither flutter nor rustle, whilst cooling contrasting shadows are absent, and the sea is without its coastal waves. There is neglect for the wilderness that capably coexists within the Edenic. It is a scent without air, and where a great sense of warming heat ought to emanate from the texture of this material, secreting from its surface so to glisten and twinkle, in Cythère this very charming oiliness and creaminess is feeble, lacking confident power of delivery. It feels incomplete, and becomes adjacent to the very effect it wishes to create, when its aesthetic qualities should inhere in the same instance of its delivery. Its content lacks pronounced effect, and rather exists in some functional manner disjointed from the sensory experience itself. Despite its ease and the louche appearance of Cythère, its concerns are exceedingly technical. An overt technicality, insofar that it exists uncomfortably against (or even overcomes) a natural sense of order and rhythm, requires explicative thought. And too much effort of intellection and understanding in the sensorial-aesthetic regime is disruption.
Whilst the scene Nagel has created is neither dynamic nor expansive enough – what she has created is a situation of sudden and immediate expression – attempting to cover up great technical pains under the guise of pretty simplicity. Nagel does not accept nature as it is, and thus works in tangible resistance against its source material. She wishes to halt, analyse, and repeat nature eternally – so to achieve the same outcome every time – an assumption which forgets that by freezing nature, is dissipates and denatures its very essence and activity. Her aesthetic analogue is photography, shot with a certain frankness and excessive cleanliness and stillness, frozen when apprehended, and fixedly tied to a certain two-dimensional perspective. How does one capture a breeze in photography, if not through a static analogue of motion – through an object under the effect of force? In the earlier Jardin perfumes authored by Jean-Claude Ellena, these are oriented by an aesthetics of ephemerality, leaning on the rhythmic possibilities granted by a poetic model. Everything occurs within the deep spaces created by Ellena’s laconic prose, the infinite space between each and every syllable like utter chasms generously filled and overflowing with air. To let be, or to leave undisturbed, allows the infinite to come through.
The fragrance has its charms and its appealing sense of soothing stillness. I will gleefully wear Cythère for its interesting play of unusual olfactory colour and for its strange and slow heat – baked into the particles that constitute the landscape, softening to a thick blood temperature. I will wear it for its interesting contrasts, where unctuousness and freshness coexist, and where immiscible and translucent textures hang together but do not mix, anchored by an opaque core. For Cythère is an exercise in proportion, a study of interesting effects in which the borders of a scent can be detected, and its movement can be perceived from within these boundaries. With this, Cythère exposes its major fault: Nagel has placed a clear glass dome over nature so to create a snapshot of it, robbing it of its very naturalism. This isolated portion of nature cannot renew itself, and so it simply expires. The beautiful pattern dies with it, never really having had the chance – this the prerequisite of a moving aesthetic experience. Nagel approaches art and creation like a technician, with the cool and sterile fascination of a scientist, when the great realisation is that art only becomes art after the fact of creation – art is its experience.
