Beyond the Frame: How Perfume Reinvents the Way We Experience Art

For years, museums have explored every possible medium to enhance the visitor experience: light, sound, immersive scenography, and interactive devices. Yet one of the most powerful artistic languages has long stood at the door, waiting to be invited in. Perfume, with its ability to evoke memory, atmosphere, and emotional resonance, is increasingly becoming part of curatorial practice. It is no longer a decorative addition. It is a narrative tool.

The new exhibition, Pekka Halonen, An Ode to Finland, at the Petit Palais, marks another step in this evolving relationship between fragrance and the fine arts. Not only does it offer the first French retrospective dedicated to one of Finland’s most important painters. It also introduces three fragrances explicitly created for the exhibition by perfumer Daphné Bugey for DSM-Firmenich. These scents do not “illustrate” Halonen’s art in a literal way. They converse with it. They extend it. They allow visitors to enter the painter’s world through a sense that Halonen himself cherished: the emotional depth of nature.

This approach is not new. Paris has staged several pioneering olfactory exhibitions, most notably Francis Kurkdjian’s iconic Le Parfum installation at the Palais de Tokyo, which placed fragrance at the centre of a contemporary art dialogue. But what is happening today reflects something more structural: museums are recognising scent as a legitimate artistic medium, capable of shaping interpretation and redefining our understanding of an artwork.

When artworks gain a scent

Halonen’s paintings are filled with light, silence, and a near-reverential attention to nature. His Nordic landscapes are not just panoramas. They are atmospheres. Through winter luminosity, domestic interiors, forests, and frozen lakes, Halonen expressed the complexity of Finnish identity, somewhere between intimate solitude and political awakening.

Daphné Bugey’s compositions extend these atmospheres into the visitor’s physical space.

“Halosenniemi” recreates the painter’s wooden atelier near Lake Tuusula. It is a dense, resinous scent built around birch Nature Print, with smoky nuances and leathery accents. Visitors stepping into this scented zone do not simply observe the atelier. They inhabit it. The smell of wood, tools, and time-worn materials becomes an extension of Halonen’s solitude and craftsmanship.

“L’Éloge de la Nature” captures the green, mineral clarity of the Finnish forest. Juniper, Siberian pine, and oakmoss form a vertical structure of sap, needles, and soil. A bright aquatic note, Cascalone, introduces the sensation of cold water running through moss. This fragrance echoes Halonen’s plein air practice: the act of painting not from memory, but from physical immersion in the landscape.

“Symphonie en Blanc Majeur” transforms the whiteness of snow into an olfactory experience. Aldehydes and an icy molecule called Hivernal recreate the palpable sharpness of winter air. Mint and eucalyptus evoke a cutting breeze. A soft layer of musk and sandalwood mirrors the muted silence of freshly fallen snow. It is not simply a perfume. It is an atmosphere of stillness.

Each fragrance becomes a subtle dramaturgy inside the exhibition. They guide visitors from room to room, not with sound or text, but through a sensorial shift. The paintings gain an emotional frequency that extends beyond the frame.

Why museums are embracing scent

Olfactory installations are often described as “immersive”, but their impact is more nuanced than that. Perfume works on three levels that align naturally with curatorial storytelling:

1. Emotional immediacy

Scent bypasses rational processing and speaks directly to memory. This makes it particularly effective for exhibitions centred on place, identity, or sensory environments. Halonen’s landscapes, for example, rely heavily on atmosphere. Perfume reinforces this dimension without competing with the visual narrative.

2. Multimodal interpretation

Art history has long been dominated by sight. Introducing scent disrupts this hierarchy. It broadens the visitor’s interpretative experience. It also supports accessibility, offering new entry points for those who might not traditionally connect with visual art.

3. Cultural legitimacy

Perfume’s presence in museums signals its recognition as an artistic discipline. Exhibitions such as The Art of Perfume at the Barbican, Le Grand Musée du Parfum in Paris, and installations by Kurkdjian have already demonstrated that fragrance can be analysed, curated, and exhibited with the same rigor as other art forms.

Halonen’s retrospective fits naturally within this movement: his work is already built on sensory perception: the forest, the snow, the silence of interiors, the rhythm of seasons. Adding scent is less an enhancement than a continuation.

A growing dialogue between perfumers and curators

The collaboration between Petit Palais and DSM-Firmenich illustrates a broader trend: perfumers working directly with museum environments, adopting the role of interpreters rather than illustrators. They compose an atmosphere of an era, a place, or a painter’s universe.

This relationship also raises important creative questions. What is the “scent” of a landscape painted in 1905? How does one translate texture into fragrance? How do you construct a scent that enhances rather than distracts?

Bugey’s approach to Halonen shows that the most effective answers avoid literalism. Instead of “painting the painting,” she builds fragrances that echo the emotional intention behind the artwork.

Toward a new art form

More than a trend, olfactory curation is becoming a new language of museums. It reflects our contemporary desire for multisensory experiences and for a deeper connection with cultural narratives. It also redefines perfume itself, positioning it as a medium capable of dialogue with visual creation.

With the Halonen exhibition, Paris adds another milestone to this evolving story. Paintings gain depth. Visitors gain presence. Museums gain a new artistic voice.

And perfume gains what it has always deserved: a place among the arts.