Claudine Drai is an artist who defines herself as a « language sculptor ». For the past ten years she has, together with perfume designers, led a research about their own creations and the emotional and imaginative empire of fragrance, an element she understands as the invisible and immaterial substance which allows one to « inhale emotion ». This approach has led her to create aromatic sensations which she has integrated, along with paper, silk, light and words - as though they were material - into her plastic universe. Latent emotions sleep at the back of our mind; these become explicit or manifest when they come across an element, visible or non-visible, made of a similarly immaterial stuff.

For her first exhibition at the Galerie Jérôme De Noirmont, from September 14 to October 13, 2005, Claudine Drai has designed a specific project, inspired by La Goutte d’Air, which she had installed in the townhall of Paris 18th Arrondissement during the first Nuit Blanche of October 2002.
Here and now, the artist invites us to a journey inside ourselves, a journey inside our emotions. For this purpose, she takes us through an ephemeral construction built within the gallery. In this sort of labyrinth, assimilated to our « mental body », we are to be led through a succession of locks or walled spaces intended to procure us a new awareness of our emotions.
Providing a space amounts to have the body travel in it. It is meant to have the visitor experience both spatiality and air materiality since air is both alive and lively. With air moving around, one feels the world moving inside oneself and simultaneously feels the world moving along with oneself. Creation being constantly evolving, all the emotions felt within are experienced as though they were the “real” things. Yet, they definitely belong, whether associated or dissociated, to the world of imagination. It is the specific privilege of fragrance, light and space to be experienced like emotions, the revelation of which is like a story felt in one’s flesh, side by side with the story told by one’s eyes.