Paul Schütze

About

Paul Schütze is an Australian-born artist and composer, resident in London, who turned to perfume after three decades of work across sound, installation, video, printmaking and photography. He was born in Melbourne in 1958 and moved to London in 1992.

His perfume work began in 2012, when he made In Libro De Tenebris, a scent impregnated into a large black book at the centre of an exhibition of prints. In 2015 he created three fragrances for the Sir John Soane's Museum in London, diffused through the building during a candlelit evening that evoked the family having just left the room.

He then spent two years developing the first three wearable perfumes under his own name, Tears of Eros, Behind the Rain and Cirebon, which launched in April 2016. Cuadra followed in 2017. He has no stated perfumery school or house training. Sources describe him creating the formulas himself and preferring to develop his own technique rather than follow conventional methods, so the record lists him as self-taught and independent.

His approach is that of an artist rather than a classical perfumer. Each fragrance describes a single remembered moment, such as being caught in a monsoon downpour or an evening in his Paris studio among incense and clementine skins, and the compositions skip the usual top, heart and base pyramid. The materials lean toward vetiver, cedar, incense and resins, lifted by grapefruit, pepper or cardamom.

His fragrances are unisex and unconventional, and they carry the strange, dream-like beauty found in his other work.