Intra Venus

Intra Venus by Chronotope is a fragrance for women and men. Intra Venus was launched in 2021. The nose behind this fragrance is Carter Weeks Maddox. The fragrance features Hyacinth, Yarrow, Mastic or Lentisque, Wasabi, Hinoki Wood, Cedarmoss, Cyclamen, Cypress and Mate. "A perfume for Hannah Wilke."Created during an intimate, year-long study into Hannah Wilke’s approach to artistic production, this perfume is an olfactive translation of one of the late artist’s most iconic self-portraits—one which appears in her final body of work called the Intra Venus series."In it, Wilke’s head and chest are wrapped in a knit hospital blanket—rendered in the perfume as blue hyacinth structured atop a faint note of medicinal yarrow. The image was taken as Wilke underwent a battery of invasive intravenous treatments, represented by piercing wasabi and the one-two punch of mastic, during her struggle against lymphoma, represented by an accord of poison bulb, which looms in the perfume along with cedar moss, mate, and cyclamen. Like cancer, the bulb, also called the swamp lily in the US south, is lethal and can be detected via smell long before it can be seen. In the image, Wilke gently closes her eyes, cocks her head to the side and smiles softly. Warm and content under blanket, and in spite of her circumstance, she appears to have achieved transcendence. Camphorous cypress leaves and hinoki wood, materials also found in Buen Camino, a perfume which depicts my own experience of a spiritual high in the presence of pain and bodily breakdown, simulate Wilke’s rapturous affective state. "For decades, Wilke stated that she made “art for life’s sake.” In my own attempts to render moments from life and to represent the body via scent—to make tangible what are, essentially, ghosts, I’ve frequently thought on the ending lines of Susan Sontag’s 'The Way We Live Now': '[…] the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He’s still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can’t show ‘still.’ You can just show him being alive.' In the Intra Venus portraits, Wilke is beautifully, gloriously alive. "When my brother smelled Spite EdP, he claimed it smelled like our grandmother, who passed as I composed the formula. I didn’t intend to inject it with her smell. But he was right. And when I spray it now, for just a moment, there she is. Hannah Wilke’s work helps me inch closer to an answer for a question I have frequently wondered about—and that I hope to forever wonder at: can perfume, like language, express 'still'?" (info from the brand)