The Spanish artist reimagines five cult-favorite scents, turning LOEWE’s candle collection into a visual experience worth pausing for.
LOEWE Perfumes has invited artist Ignasi Monreal into its botanical world, asking him to interpret five of the house’s signature candles in his own style. The result is a series of digital paintings that expand how we might think about scent, not just as something we wear or burn, but something we can look at and sit with.
The project centers on the brand’s Home Scents line, featuring five core fragrances: Ivy, Tomato, Marijuana, Beetroot, and Oregano. Instead of illustrating the candles in a straightforward way, Monreal distills how each one feels. Ivy is rendered as a thick mass of tangled green wrapping around a terracotta vessel, like something grown overnight. Tomato appears engulfed in flames, less about the vegetable itself and more about the heat it implies. Marijuana is mirrored back at us, creating a double image that plays with perception. Beetroot sends out a plume of smoke that bends into LOEWE’s signature anagram. Oregano sits in soft pools of pastel wax, its flame quietly held in the middle.
Monreal’s work often pulls from both classical painting and digital realism, a mix that fits easily with LOEWE’s taste for craft filtered through a modern lens. He’s worked with the brand before on ready-to-wear campaigns, but this collaboration marks a shift, less about fashion and more about building out the fragrance story with the same level of detail and imagination.
The house has made a point of approaching scent as a full experience, not something limited to what you spray or light. By bringing in Monreal, the perfumes arm continues to develop its own language, one that’s just as visual as it is olfactive. The images don’t just accompany the candles, they expand them, giving each scent a world to exist in. It’s not about telling you what they smell like. It’s about letting you see what they could be.
