The Memory of Smoke

A few year back, in a class I audited on Robert Motherwell, the lecturer went on and on about white space, the blank canvas, etc. Likewise, Christopher Brosius’s olfactory creations, for better or worse, have always struck me as studies in what isn’t there. But I fear I must strain the painting analogy a bit further: his fragrances remind me of paint. Or to be more exact still: they remind me of paint’s smell. Some are like tempera, others oil, yet others the smell of an old oil on canvas. (When the guards aren’t looking, I sometimes get frighteningly close.) This is not said by way of disparagement. Fire from Heaven, the third of his “primal smells” series, is breathtakingly beautiful. As beautiful indeed as an Orientalist scene of Damascus from the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Brosius, who made his name at companies like Kiehl’s and Demeter, isn’t known for the opulence his perfumes. His affectation, rather, tends to melancholy, backward glances and a certain brand of North Brooklyn nostalgie. Names like Snowed In 1973, Poor Leaf I Trod and Grandmother’s Brace populate the shelves of his humble Wythe Avenue studio; beneath them, a wealth of absolutes labeled everything from Dandelion to – my favorite – Ocean (Mediterranean). A behemoth dog of indeterminate breed patrols.

Fire from Heaven takes its cue from literary fag hag Mary Renault’s eponymous novel about Alexander the Great. Apparently, the book is filled with incense. To my nose in the perfume absolute concentration, Brosius succeeds at wedding the sweetness of opopanax to the brisk sting of cedarwood, rounding off the edges with sandalwood, styrax and labdanum. As he himself is wont to admit, this is a scent about subtlety. At first, the elements seem all scrunched together, but with time the air clears a bit. And what is left is, at intervals, dark and light, sparkling and opaque.

Fire from Heaven may not inspire divine retribution, but it will invite warm nuzzles on cool autumn nights. Some may call it an incense for the incense-neophyte or, even perhaps, the incense-lite type. This is hardly tepid praise. Some of the big perfume houses could learn something here for when the hordes tire of flamboyant frankincense and just want someone (or -thing) to keep home fires burning.