Barnabé Fillion

L'Almanach 26 : Barnabé Fillion

Barnabé Fillion (1981, Paris)
Barnabé Fillion's exhibition is supported by MANE and Arpa Studios.

Barnabé Fillion (1981, Paris) lives and works in Paris, Venice, and Kyoto. While studying photography, he developed an interest in perfumery and cultivated a synesthetic practice. For more than a decade, he has been creating fragrances for various perfume houses and collaborating with designers and artists: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Philippe Parreno, Anicka Yi...

This exhibition, at the intersection of his career in perfumery, botany, visual arts, and design, is part of a research project centered on an “iris mutanti,” developed as a potential new species by Barnabé Fillion and his studio: Iris Mutanti Officinalis. Through this project, he presents a series of nocturnal studies dedicated to this mutant flower, straddling the boundary between botanical phenomenon, fiction, and perceptual memory.

The project emerged from the intersection of this research on the iris and a collection of residual images drawn from the perfumer’s journal. These images find their origin in the Japanese concept of makyō: the first visions that appear when we close our eyes in a space of contemplation. Here, they are rendered through a photographic process by which he explores the possibility of capturing a fragment of these shifting images. The exhibition connects this visual research with the olfactory transformation of the iris. In perfumery, iris is extracted from the plant’s rhizome, which is slowly dried and then ground into powder before being processed to obtain its olfactory essence. This transformation is of particular interest to Barnabé Fillion, as the scent of the iris is not extracted from the visible flower, but from a buried, invisible, subterranean, and horizontal substance. 
The exhibition thus seeks to connect this invisible essence of perfume, the residual images evoked by our senses, and the possible dreams of flowers.
A question thus runs through the entire project: Do flowers dream, and do they share their dreams with one another? What if these dreams constituted the reality of our own world? Do they, then, dream of our reality? Each piece thus serves as an observation of the Iris Mutanti Officinalis: not only as a flower but also as an anomaly of a perceptual phenomenon, a residual apparition of a fictional organism in the making.