Fine fragrance – Fine art
Photography that dissolves boundaries between painting and photography. With curiosity and lust photographer Dawid creates dynamic work of art with no limitations for the eye of the beholder.
SG79|STHLM is something as simple as the address where ideas and scents are created. Scents with no limitation to fashion, lifestyle or other multinational brand, just fine fragrance for you to explore and enjoy.
About SG79|STHLM
SG79|STHLM is a growing range of fragrances created by Romella in 2015. The range is based on the photography of the renowned artist Dawid. New fragrances are added to the collection regularly – find your own personal favourites! Fragrances are very much about your personal taste, your interpretations, memories and associations – just like fine art photography. SG79|STHLM stands for the address where the ideas for the fragrance range are born – Sibyllegatan 79 in Stockholm.
When Romella saw Dawid’s photographs, the suggestive images sparked an inspiration – that a finely crafted perfume could create that same artistic room for interpretation. Fragrances that demand reflection and courage of the recipient and allow the wearer to create their own personal associations. The perfumes in the SG79|STHLM range were composed in collaboration with Givaudan and Mane, two of the most distinguished perfume houses in France. Packages and bottles are elegantly understated, so that what meets the eye goes hand in hand with your experience of the fragrances.
Many of the images that form the basis of the SG79|STHLM fragrances reflect different faces of Stockholm. Like the city’s dramatic contrasts between sturdy stone buildings with bright facade colours, the fragrances are composed of elements that contrast and harmonise with each other. Flowers and other plants have always been present when perfumes are created, and they are also a key ingredient in the images here. For some of the latest perfumes in the SG79|STHLM range, Dawid used the camera’s features to transform a plant into what is practically a free-floating, luminescent organism. His photograph – rather than the flower it depicts – became the seed that our perfumers cultivated into a unique fragrance.
The combination of photography and perfume may seem implausible at first, but really the two are closely intertwined. Just as a photo can conjure the memory of a scent, a fragrance can create images in your mind’s eye. The two one-dimensional sensory impressions are each other’s opposites, and the genesis of the perfumes in the SG79|STHLM range creates a bridge between these worlds. Our perfume designers simply start with one of Dawid’s photos. Then they develop an accord of fragrances, with top notes, heart notes and base notes that invisibly mirror the image – one artist’s creation speaking to another’s. The result is up to every individual to interpret. Perhaps your associations will be entirely different from Dawid’s or any of our perfumers’ when they created their own parts of the composition.
The SG79|STHLM range is the brainchild of the Swedish company Romella, which has a long history in the perfume industry. Romella has previously created perfume collections for well-known brands such as Gant, Björn Borg, Salming and Lexington. SG79|STHLM is Romella’s first fragrance range under its own label that is manufactured and packaged in Sweden, which makes Romella extra-proud.
About DAWID
Dawid is one of those photographers who successfully directed his eyes towards both the motive in front of the camera and towards the photography as a medium. With an intellectual sharpness, pronounced sensuality and strong feeling for shapes he creates pictures where as well as established perceptions about genres and relations between expressions are added into movements.
Dawid is crossing boundaries in several respects. Already with the exhibition “Nobody loves me” at the art hall Liljevalchs in Stockholm 1973 he claims, in opposition to the current documentary ideal, the photography as an artistic medium. He belongs to thhose who early experimented with big negative format and the exhibition “Rost at the Fotografiska museum” at the Modern museum 1983 shook up the Swedish photographic scene.
The ability to use the help with photography to turn the overlooked into pictures and expectations is a hallmark of Dawid. Something that highly incuse the today classic series Arbetsnamn Skulptur (1991).
In an equal radical and aesthetic seductive way he combines and dissolves the limits between painting, photography and sculpture. He succeeds in a liberating manner to undermine the separation between the modern striving after purity and the post modern ideal of hybridization.
Lust and curiosity are the driving forces and the works range over not less than five decades. There are often longer series that held together with both visual and conceptual characteristics. The vision and the photography are in focus and despite the differences the plants shape a fabric where the earliest and latest works are combined, independent if they are to come on its own initiative, such as series with weapon and flickering tv screens, or as mission for Japanese fashion magazines or car companies. 2004 was Dawid awarded the big prize of Artistic board for his artistic act and significance in our age.
About Dawid text by: Niclas Östlind
