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BENEDICT ROMAIN

SCULPTURE

PROPS

SET

For him and for herm

Perfume bottles, plaster, clear resin, gold and silver leaf, light-box, wood, aluminium, electric room fragrance dispenser

100 x 130 x 60 cm

Perfume bottles became a perfect host for the Greek Hermic form, not only for their appropriate shape and readymade human characteristics, but their association with eroticism that is often wrongly linked with Greek symbolic imagery.

Perfume is sold in part, to aide sexual attraction, constantly flaunted through highly charged advertising and glamorous design and display. This skin-deep commerciality is the antithesis of the Hermai in which representation of the phallus is not at all erotic but apotropaic. Yet the bottles become warped fertility figures, apotropaic in the form of pulling-power charms, as claimed by the fragrance vendors in club toilets who constantly sing 'No spray no lay, no splash no gash' to drunkards hoping to get laid.

Characters emerge and partnerships form between gendered bottles, and both sexes are appropriated to accentuate their sexual presence. The strong scent of perfume mixed with sweat, lubrication and condoms reminds us of sex and human exertion while the sleekly crafted display counter maintains the glamorous yet clinical feel of the fragrance industry's aesthetic.

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