Boris Raux, Sinus
Text by Camille Azaïs, 2024

Today, we live in a degraded environment. While it’s still possible to marvel at a pretty corner of the countryside, let’s face it: waterways are heated, polluted and saturated with mud. Soils are irremediably mixed with a host of plastic particles and eternal pollutants. Behind every clump of trees, a landfill. And that’s not to mention the subsoil: wherever we dig, we find coal residues, rubble, tarpaulins and scrap metal carcasses. The number of species with which we interact on a daily basis is so small it’s sad to cry. Three cereals (rice, wheat, corn), a handful of vegetables and fruit, a few street and garden animals. In the countryside, diversity is also rapidly diminishing as land is cleared, «tended», exploited and artificialized. On the train journey from Normandy to Paris, I look at the senseless piles of trunks and branches torn from the embankments, and wonder why. Why does our civilization go out of its way to «clean up» these free, unused areas, the last refuges of the countryside’s small fauna?

The birch accepts poor, damp, disturbed soil; its tracer roots enable it to quickly colonize a new area. Like all so-called «pioneer» species, those that express more than others the spontaneous movement of any plot of land towards the forest (at least in our latitudes), it is in fact often treated as a weed. In the Pilat Nature Park, it thrives in the interstices between the most mature forests, which are remarkable for their biodiversity, and the areas that have been logged. That’s where Boris Raux came to collect one of them, a venerable birch that was already beginning its decline towards death. Displayed on a pine structure like a recumbent statue, this plant creature is offered a final homage: the still-vibrant strength of its sawed-off body (transported by traffic) can be expressed for one more season, in the form of its scent. In a reciprocal gesture, the birch tree honored in this way, thanks to the water vapour that passes through it and picks up its essential oils, takes care of our sinuses.

Boris Raux has been fascinated by the world of smells since he began working in the field some twenty years ago. This «fragile and vaporous» place, largely untouched by the art world, has been the subject of a fertile evolution in his work. From early «pop» installations featuring the standardized odors of our daily lives (shower gels, Maggi cubes, laundry detergents) to recent Fabriques, in which scent is a starting point for thinking about ways of relating to one another, Boris Raux has moved from an interest in «capturing» odors in the form of elaborate perfumes (a logic of control and re-creation) to an interest in the complexity of scents released freely by odorous bodies.

Boris Raux doesn’t create perfumes with perfumers, as other artists do (I’m thinking of Julie C. Fortier, or the experiments of Morgan Courtois), but seeks to make us sensitive to that repressed part of our lives and our experience of art, which urges us to encounter it.

Smells are bodies that interpenetrate. That’s probably why they are so emotionally charged: we can’t resist their invasion. Sinus brings us into the presence of a non-human being, with its woody, smoky scent, the tannins of its bark, the shavings of its light-colored wood from which we like to make lollipop sticks and tongue depressors. In so doing, the artist celebrates not only the tree as a tree, but also the tree within us. For in an irreparably degraded environment like ours, it’s high time we learned one essential thing: to cross over, and let ourselves be crossed over, by all forms of life, even the simplest and most common. .