Francis Kurkdjian: what happens when perfume leaves the bottle

Francis Kurkdjian’s Perfume, Sculpture of the Invisible posed a curatorial problem worth returning to after the exhibition ended: how do you show something whose defining material cannot be contained in a photograph? Presented at the Palais de Tokyo from 29 October to 23 November 2025, the project treated fragrance as a medium that could enter relationships with images, objects, performance and music.

Those dates matter. This is a retrospective reading of the exhibition, not an invitation to an event currently running in Paris. Its continuing relevance lies in the questions its works raise, and in the documentation and recorded discussions that remain available.

A different kind of display

The Palais de Tokyo’s exhibition account situates the presentation in the Saut du Loup space and identifies collaborations with Sophie Calle, Yann Toma, Cyril Teste, Christelle Boulé and Klaus Mäkelä. Jérôme Neutres curated the project, according to the Maison’s retrospective documentation.

A conventional perfume display can make the bottle stand in for the work. That solution is convenient for photography and collecting, but it leaves the act of smelling outside the frame. The exhibition’s premise instead made that difficulty its subject. What can an image communicate about a fragrance, and what must remain an encounter that cannot be reproduced on a page?

The image is not the scent

Christelle Boulé’s Expanded Drops, identified in the Maison’s documentation as experimental photography from 2019, offers one route through that problem. Perfume participates in producing a visual work. The result is not a diagram telling the viewer exactly how the fragrance smells; it is another material consequence of the encounter.

That difference is important. Translation between senses is not literal equivalence. A colour may suggest an association, but it cannot guarantee the same response in every viewer. The more interesting possibility is that the work makes a familiar material unfamiliar, opening a second way of considering it without claiming to replace the first.

A composition can have several authors

L’Alchimie des sens was conceived around Baccarat Rouge 540. The documented programme brought Kurkdjian together with collaborators including Cyril Teste, Elias Crespin, David Chalmin, Katia and Marielle Labèque and Anne-Sophie Pic. The range of disciplines is part of the argument: a perfume can act as a starting point for a shared composition rather than a finished object that other artists merely decorate.

The Maison’s broader account also describes Kurkdjian’s work with the Labèque pianists on a 2024 Cocteau and Philip Glass programme. Fragrances were composed alongside music and staging. That places the 2025 exhibition within an ongoing practice, not an isolated anniversary gesture.

What remains after an olfactory exhibition

Documentation can preserve the participants, the construction of a work and the ideas discussed around it. It cannot fully preserve what each visitor smelled. That limit is not a failure unique to perfume; performance, sound and changing installations also resist reduction to an image.

The Maison has made recordings of the exhibition’s conferences and roundtables available through its retrospective page. They offer a way to follow the thinking behind the project now, without pretending that listening reconstructs the original experience. Perfume’s departure from the bottle is most convincing when it expands the questions we can ask of it, rather than simply enlarging the scale of its presentation.

Follow: @maisonfranciskurkdjian.