Ombre Du Desir
May 8, 2025 2025-05-09 17:16Ombre Du Desir
Ombre Du Désir
Painting and perfume are traces.
Signs left by human beings in their desire to prolong their presence through time—beyond what is visible.
Art has always been part of
our way of seeing the world.
Whether expressed through a brushstroke or an olfactory composition, art is always a bridge: a delicate thread connecting vision and perception, image and breath.
An emotion held within matter, patiently waiting—quietly—to be discovered.
We chose to collaborate with Renato Calaj because his painting evokes, moves, and vibrates.
His instinctive, profound gesture speaks the same invisible language as fragrance.
This is how our dialogue between art and perfume took shape:
a meeting of essence and mark, of material and emotion.
Desire is never pure light.
It is shadow, movement, anticipation.
It is the silence before a word, the pause between two breaths.
Ombre du Désir seeks to evoke exactly this: that fragile yet powerful moment when something passes through us and—though it remains unseen—leaves a trace behind.
Gianluca Gariboldi
“The fragrance ‘Ombre du Désir’ stirred my senses.
I felt a subtle desire, like a shadow drifting in the air.
It was that silent call that guided every line of this creation:
a hidden emotion, revealed only to those who know how to look beyond.”
Renato Calaj
A painterly gesture, an intervention, a stroke on the canvas from which twilight atmospheres emerge.
Mauve tones follow an ascending tension, engaging in dialogue with sensations reminiscent of oxidized matter—an amber veil that crowns the aniconic composition. . Like a whisper in the ear of the attentive, like a breeze that brushes the air as a fragrance would, it offers a synesthetic experience.This is an intimate work, l’ombra di un desiderio that eludes the gaze and yet embraces, envelops, and merges into a single breath.
Renato Calaj’s practice is one of silence, a reflection shaped by minimalist sensibility that—through a continuous subtractive process—translates the urban landscape into a language of distilled meaning. His are hybrid compositions, layered with significance, forming a complex vocabulary of surfaces and voids. His pictorial language favours acrylics, enamels, and industrial paints—synthetic pigments constructing a visual imagination as anthropic as the urban periphery from which he draws inspiration.
A liminal space, a site of transition. A porous dimension in which the concept of the border relinquishes its marginal condition in favour of a new, central role. Construction sites and scaffolding, urban skeletons of iron and steel, become metaphors of impermanence—of the material world, and of the increasingly precarious human condition. The marks on the painted surface are traces of a layered creative process; an intentional use of emptiness, of that imaginative absence which, in Calaj’s case, echoes the idea of the non finito.
The artist strips matter bare, deconstructs it, and recontextualizes it through an apparently mechanical approach that, in fact, conceals a profound understanding of the meaning of mimesis. His work inhabits a suspended dimension, outside of time and space—hovering between a fleeting moment and the weight of history. It captures sensations born of experience—in this case, the encounter between two heterogeneous art forms, arriving at renewed harmony through dialogue and exchange. The result is a powerful relationship between the visible and the invisible, between material and essence.
Edoardo Durante
