Mad et Len × Nicole Hollis — Bleu Outrenoir ; reading time 8min

reading time 5min

In the atelier where metal meets thought, Mad et Len and Nicole Hollis craft a new collection.

Nicole Hollis brings to this collaboration her mastery of space and emotional architecture. Her practice explores how volumes shape our feelings, how an object can transform the atmosphere of a room. Mad et Len weave in their artisanal expertise, their love for raw and noble materials, their ability to create fragrances that tell stories. Together, they sculpt an experience where the tangible and the ephemeral converse.

The sculpted cap metamorphoses beneath the shifting gaze—now an inverted pyramid, now an abstract heart, now pure geometry. The form refuses to settle. It belongs as much to the one who contemplates it as to the one who forged it.

This collaboration is born from an obsession: reality exists only through the filter of our perceptions. What seems absolute dissolves as soon as we shift our body, tilt our head, let light slide differently across the matte black surface. Metal, raw and immutable matter, becomes fluid. It carries within itself all its possible forms, all its potential readings. Nothing is fixed, everything is suspended movement.

The hand-forged black metal bears the traces of its creation. Each irregularity, each nuance in the patina tells the artisan's gesture.

Bleu Outrenoir is paradox and synesthesia. A color to be breathed, a scent to be seen.

In the universe of this collection, the senses blend and merge. Blue is no longer merely chromatic—it becomes olfactory. Black is no longer the absence of light but a dense presence, an enveloping texture. Outrenoir—that territory where Pierre Soulages found light within darkness—becomes here an olfactory realm where Mad et Len and Nicole Hollis weave a total sensory experience. The object becomes ritual, meditation on what it truly means to perceive.

Blue and black seek each other in the notes of the fragrance. Each breath reveals a new facet, just as each angle of the cap reveals an unprecedented geometry. Synesthesia is not accident but intention: to make color felt, to make fragrance visible, to create a bridge between what the eye perceives and what the nose divines.

In the intimacy of your space, the Bleu Outrenoir candle and potpourri unfold their discreet yet powerful poetry, transforming the act of lighting a candle or diffusing a fragrance into meditation on the very nature of perception. These two objects invite us to observe how our position in space changes what we see, how our mood transforms what we smell. They remind us that beauty sometimes lies in uncertainty.