En Plein Cœur at Maison Guerlain in Paris is a perfumed group show on the theme of love and desire, fragranced with scents evoking the inspirations of the artworks on display
James Baldwin described love as “the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light”. Proust called it a “reciprocal torture”. For Simone de Beauvoir, it was a potential source of “mortal danger”. Anne Sexton described it as “something like prayer”, it “can’t be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief". However you think of love, it’s surely our life’s greatest work.
En Plein Cœur, an exhibition currently running at Maison Guerlain in Paris, delves headlong into the exhilarating chaos of amour with an extraordinary selection of artworks exhibited across three floors of their flagship store on the Champs-Élysées. Bringing together the work of 30 artists, including John Giorno, David Hockney, Pablo Picasso and Niki de Saint Phalle to name but a few, the show invites us to contemplate love and desire in its multiple manifestations.
The exhibition coincides with the centenary of Shalimar, one of the renowned perfume house’s most seductive signature fragrances. Delphine Jelk, Guerlain’s Director of Perfume Creation, has worked closely with artists from the show to compose new scents or select resonant fragrances from the Guerlain collection in response to various works on display. The perfumes, integrated into the exhibition, add an extra heady and sensual dimension to the show.
Louise Bourgeois’ Untitled (1997) offers a tender vision of love as a plant-like organism. In red and pink ink and watercolours, she shows us a delicate, intricate form that, while it may need tending, is also capable of growth, healing and resilience. Alongside her painting is a portrait of the artist herself by Robert Mapplethorpe. Lit with the photographer’s masterful sense of light and shade, Bourgeois grins mischievously, clutching Filette (1968), her unmistakably phallic sculpture, beneath her arm.
Chinese photographer Ren Hang is best known for his graphic, daring nudes elegantly flirting with the limitations of China’s censorship laws. Untitled (2014) is an erotically-charged work featuring multiple immaculately manicured hands cupping the breasts of a naked torso. It’s striking in its symmetry and surrealist arrangement of limbs. Meanwhile, in an adjoining room, a photograph by Sofiya Loriashvili from her series Only You and Me (2023-2024) also portrays a configuration of limbs and torsos. In this case, the bodies are all hyperrealistic sex dolls, with the exception of Loriashvili’s naked body placed among the silicone simulations. It’s an extension of the Ukraine-born Paris-based photographer’s exploration of her experiences as a sex worker. This image provokes questions about fantasy, passivity, and the commodification of desire. Her own body is hard to distinguish from the mass of faux flesh.
Belgian photographer and filmmaker Charlotte Abramow playfully confronts the “mystery” surrounding female genitals with her triptych of photographs titled Find Your Clitoris (2018). In a series of close-up crops of a lipsticked mouth, what could be a bra, and what may be cleavage, Abramow suggestively toys with her theme by presenting us with mysterious, slightly abstracted but suggestive folds of flesh and fabric. There are echoes of Abramow’s approach in the work of Hui Choi, on display upstairs. Like Hang, Choi also skirts ingeniously around the rigid rules of Chinese censorship. In his series A Swan’s Journey (2024), his truly gorgeous close-crops of body parts, flower stamens, and parted mouths are sensual and provocative.
Another highlight of En Plein Cœur is a film of Ulay and Marina Abramović’s Imponderabilia (1977). This seminal performance (though Ulay always preferred the German word “aktion”), originally staged at the Galleria Communale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, involved the collaborator-lovers standing naked and facing one another. The narrow space between them formed the entrance to the gallery, and the general public was invited to take turns passing through. As each individual passes, we watch them navigate the intimate channel formed between the artists’ bodies, unaware they’re being filmed by a hidden camera, thereby becoming the unwitting subjects of the artwork they came to observe. Some people breeze through, some make eye contact, while others keep their gazes studiously averted; everyone moves differently across the threshold formed by the duo’s naked bodies. It was intended to last three hours, but after 90 minutes, the police put an end to this controversial performance. Almost 50 years since it was staged, this investigation into human behaviour and intimacy by one of the most iconic pairs of artist lovers continues to fascinate.
To move from floor to floor on an olfactory journey of curated perfumes, encountering the extraordinary range of artworks in En Plein Cœur, is to move through myriad evocations of love – love as a sanctuary, love as a thrill, love as a battleground, love as desolation, love as peace, love as obsession. Stepping out onto the Champs-Élysées afterwards, it’s clearer than ever that this single word – a tiny word, composed of just four letters – is one of the most indomitable forces our lives can ever be touched by. In the words of Truman Capote, “Love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface.”
En Plein Cœur is running at Maison Guerlain, Paris, until 16 November, 2025.