An art show without images or really even objects, Dreaming in Smell presents a suite of micro-stories that express themselves not in pictures or shapes, but in scents. It includes a smell so cool it’s like a breeze on the skin; a face-crinkling assault of mold and hairspray; incense over Led Zeppelin; a non-binary cop trying to be his authentic self. Few experience scent while in dream states, but artist Bernardo Fleming does. As an industry professional with International Flavors and Fragrances, he also has uncommon access to collaborators with whom to create the scents he’s jotted down in his dream journal. Even though few have experienced this kind of oneiric odorific, we are all aware of the unique power of scent to prompt à la Proust sudden cognitive shifts, visceral reactions and mysterious emotions. Don’t be surprised if you encounter a memory that diverges from the artist’s story, because although the dreams belong to the artist, olfactory perception makes its own special way through everyone’s brain and simply finds what it finds there.

The aroma delivery system is soft and clean pastel-colored bed sheets and pillows (gently evoking bedtime); as you enter, the gallerist darts ahead and spritzes each with its appointed scent. It lingers there for you alone. A printed handout gives titles and summaries of the dream which gave rise to each crafted smell. Dentista—May 2016 (with Ricardo Moya) presents clean and cool sweet mint and medicine like a dentist’s office, which Fleming readily admits may not be a calming memory for everyone. But for him, it’s about his mother, the after-work smell of her, and the comfort and safety she provided. Dýer Mak’er—18 September 2021, Nijmegen (with Meabh McCurtin) reminds him of his youth as well, but the teenage part of burning incense and listening to trippy rock music and figuring out who you want to be. It’s sweet like cocoa butter and musky like palo santo and there are other things too, sharp and sour notes that seem to change or flicker as you try to capture them. It’s a liminal scent for a liminal time of life.

Cana (Cop)—6 October 2021, Nijmegen (with Birgit Sijbrands) offers some curious humor. In the dream, a policeman pulls the artist over in his car, but as he approaches, he’s partly dressed and made up as a woman; his breath smells intriguingly of wine and cigarettes. The scent does indeed evoke a kind of after-a-party-morning, but it also contains contradictory notes that the mind recognizes but can’t reconcile. Less pleasant but just as mysterious is Departures—23 February 2021, Nijmegen (with Anh Ngô Nguyen Viet), a meditation on old-lady perfume and moldy casino carpet. It’s pretty intense and its own description admits it, promising “musky sillage” and “suffocating floral accords.” It’s hideous and marvelous and it repels but it cannot be ignored. This piece perhaps more than any other makes it clear that while not all scents are, strictly speaking, perfume, all scents do tell someone’s story.