O / E - extrait de parfum – 2015
O/E is all about paradoxes and oxymoron. It’s halfway between acoustic and electric, digital and analogue, natural and synthetic, artisanal and industrial, outdoors and indoors, the past and the future. It’s all kind of greens ranging from citruses to leaves via oxidized copper and fruit. It’s a forest in spring, a motel room with green carpet, an astronaut wearing an Eau De Cologne, trees, wood furniture, taxidermy, a botanic garden, cigarette smoke and a crystal clear sky. It’s there to cheer you up but it’s also always ready to unleash its beast within hidden inside its massive animalic-chyprey bone-structure.
O/E is elaborately structured, hugely complicated edifice of bright, shining citruses, naturally green spices and florals, warm natural wood notes and sheer synthetic ones, and an underpinning of smoky animalic notes- all of which somehow lock together to form something bright, surprisingly light, and cheerfully uncategorizable.
The combinations are exquisite- an ultra-fresh bergamot opening stands atop a spicy, fresh herb garden of rosemary and thyme. Balsamic camphor cools off a bough of juniper, pine and cypress. A lilt of lush florals offset a benzoin-tinged resinousness, and a transluscent layer of iso-E super wraps it all together and marks the composition as unmistakably 21st century. Each bold stroke is effortlessly complimented with the kind of artistic and architectural virtuosity that balances, but never overlaps, leaving the finished product as impressive in its scope as it is wonderfully enjoyable. Halfway between acoustic and electric, digital and analogue, artisanal and industrial, indoors and outdoors, O/E is another triumph from a truly contemporary talent.
“Antonio Gardoni is, at time goes by, confirming the general impression that he is that irritating kind of person possessed of multiple talents, abundant ideas, and bottomless erudition, and his perfumes are now venturing away from the retro style of his very first creations. O/E is a very unusual interpretation of the classic citrus woody masculine, with a rarely used, cooling camphor top note and a pine-clove accord in the heart that I find delightful.”
O/E review from “PERFUMES, THE GUIDE” by Luca Turin”
Notes:
Bergamot, grapefruit, lemon, neroli, clove, black pepper, rosemary, thyme, camphor, Lebanon cedar, juniper, pine, cypress, rose, jasmine, vetiver, benzoin, tobacco, resins, sandalwood
