Dior Beauty Unveils L.A. Pop-up Gallery, Tapping Artists to Reimagine the Gris Dior Unisex Fragrance
The juice at the center of Dior’s Gris — or gray — is in fact violet.
It’s the color of the unisex fragrance, seen through its transparent bottle.
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“It definitely led a lot of the inspiration,” Ben Johnston said of the purple hue.
The artist is one of five creatives tapped by Dior to interpret the scent in works of art. He’s joined by Andrés Reisinger, Thomas Trum, Mileece and Collectif Scale. Their oeuvres are unveiled Tuesday in a pop-up art gallery in Los Angeles, “The Grey Zone,” which will be open to the public from Thursday to Sunday at 8175 Melrose Avenue.
“Violet is the base color,” continued Johnston of his creation, “Gris” — the first piece seen inside the 8,000-square-foot space. Known for his bold text-based murals, he painted a 3D typography about 25 feet long and 10 feet high.
“And then I went lighter and darker, so it’s all shades of purple, violet, but some almost look black,” he added.
The artist also signed a limited-edition bottle of Gris Dior, with 200 customized copies available for sale.
Bringing a street art element inside, the “Gris Dior” letters interplay with each other on the wall.
“From afar, it’s definitely very legible,” said Johnston, who was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and is now based in Toronto. “But close, it’s a lot of patterns. Once you step back, you get a grasp on what it says.”
Johnston had yet to smell the fragrance, he admitted, as he was working on the installation. The inspiration came from the colors and their nuances as it relates to the house — including gray, the emblematic Dior shade.
“I think color is really important,” said Trum. He, too, immersed himself in the color scheme. The artist, who lives and works in the Netherlands, is at the intersection of art and design.
“I’m currently interested in painting,” he went on. “Painting with transparent shades and having overlay and color mixing.”
He installed a wall of customized white bottles and will present a live performance during the opening, “Colourchanging Looping Line (Gris)” — a work of large, colorful circles created with the help of machinery. The display will range in tones, from magenta to lavender.
“The machine is developed by a big American paint sprayer company that is specialized in pumping fluids,” said Trum, who once worked as a house painter. “It’s really quite heavy, so you really see me putting a lot of effort in moving the machine over the wall.”
Meanwhile for Reisinger, the journey is digital — and rooted in the eau de parfum’s notes of chypre, citrus and floral.
“Having the scent in mind and in my brain and in my nose, and living with the scent for a while, I started to make some outputs, to create some results, some expressions,” he said of his work, hangings of canvasses in a digital gallery.
“I usually like to exhibit them in digital canvas, which are screens,” he went on. “They are all together to understand the whole expression of what Gris Dior evokes to me.”
The Argentinian artist, who is based in Barcelona, Spain, explained that it captures an idea that is “not very easy to express in words.”
It’s easier graphically, he added: “This idea that it’s completely a temporal set of fireworks…That’s how I feel when I experience Gris Dior. This idea of not having anything to do with a timeline. It’s not from the past. It’s not from the future. It’s all at the same time.”
For their part, Collectif Scale brought the fragrance to life with “Flux”; blending visual art with music, the Parisian collective built an olfactive box that diffuses the chypre fragrance notes of Gris Dior into the room.
Mileece, the American-British biophilic technology designer, takes it further, engaging all the senses in a separate, immersive area. Showcasing “Avant Jardin — The Essence of Fragrance is Nature,” the L.A.-based artist utilizes technology to enable biological sensations. Her goal is to connect visitors with nature.
“The point is, let’s orient technology toward helping us express the interconnectivity between ourselves and nature,” she said. “And, you know, when it comes to perfume, obviously it comes entirely from nature.”
Working with gray and purple tones, the entrance is a moonscape followed by a walk into a jungle with plants, flowers and sounds of nature, she explained. “In the most simple terms it’s that. But no matter where you are, you’re in space.”
In her work, she uses “every avenue to help connect people to nature and to orient our culture and society more towards the biosphere as a source of inspiration and connection and respect,” she added, noting that in the more lush area of the installation, the plants are designed to be able to withstand human touch.
“For me, the approach of the whole piece is to say, well, you know, here we are,” she continued. “This is where this begins. It’s not just the hand of humans, it’s really the belly of the planet that produces all the fragrance…On this planet, we have an atmosphere. And we have an atmosphere because we have plants. And because we have an atmosphere, we have sound and all of these things that we take for granted that are so unique to us on Earth. And so the idea of the installation is to really bring it down into that perspective.”
Launch Gallery: Inside the Gris Dior Exhibit
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