Random
Thoughts

A MONTH OF FOLLOWING THE DARK COMEDY OF EVERYDAY LIFE AND
THE THINGS WE THINK BUT DON'T SAY WITH OLAF BREUNING

MIXED MEDIA

Olaf Breuning is a Swiss artist whose work spans photography, sculpture, video, and installation—surreal, humorous, conceptually sharp. In November 2013, Breuning kept a sketchbook diary for us: thirty days of spontaneous drawings made over breakfast—absurd characters, visual puns, dark humor, and raw observations. Each sketch captured the unfiltered stream of his thinking, playful yet primal, surprisingly profound. His diary fragrance balances this contradiction: fresh verbena and cut grass wrapped in dark incense smoke, like nature seen through a surreal lens.

"In his conversation with Kaya, Breuning gives some very precise olfactive references: he likes the smell of a “so fresh and pure” Nature and he speaks about his taste for citrus woody fragrances. It is the direction I followed but I wanted also to infuse in it the sense of humor and absurd, the more primal shared drives, the “décalage” inherent to his work. So I created a contrast between an airy light herbal citrus top of Verbena and a nervous woody base. To give a more divergent and surprising impulse to the note, I wrapped it in an antinomic mysterious and dark veil of incense."
- PERFUMER, Antoine Lie