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How well do you know your nose? That organ is the gateway to our least understood sense, a network of more than 400 types of receptor cells (Our retinas, by contrast, have just three) Though most are concentrated in a bulb near our frontal lobe, olfactory receptors have cropped up in skin, livers, kidneys and sperm Smell is a powerful memory recall tool, and it can make us want to fuck, vomit or cry – but why and how all this works remains largely a biological mystery   This enigma drives Sean Raspet, an artist and self-trained food-and-fragrance scientist whose art is microscopic in scale Past shows at Société, Berlin have featured large plastic vats of stuff he’s cooked up in a lab: molecular compounds meant to tease our tongues or trigger our nostrils These concoctions are often clear and near-weightless, and can take the form of a liquid or a gas In his current exhibition ‘Receptor-Binding Variations’ at Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York, Raspet has devised ten ‘primary scent formulations’ that, like primary colours, trigger the range of our olfactory sense Brewed from ‘captive molecules’, or particles patented by the fragrance industry, they are housed in bone-white electric diffusers that spout their scent every 60 seconds Many of their manufactured molecules are designed to deceive the human nose: to us, they can smell more like natural goods than the organic chemicals they imitate, frustrating attempts to sniff out their origins In the gallery, all these compounds blend together to produce the faint aroma of rubber gym flooring, inoffensive but slightly unsettling   Each compound, and thus each work in the show, is labelled with the name of the receptor it’s meant to target (all works 2017) The first diffuser, 52D1, gives off a strong whiff of citronella, with notes of the artificial pineapple aroma of white gummy bears Number two, 3A1, 2AE1: a distinct odour of freshly mown grass At first pass, 2V2, 2V1 smelled like an herbaceous gin; when I returned several minutes later, I detected the sweetness of kiwi 2L5, lemon Pledge; 7G3, 8K3, 1J2, fresh asphalt; 52D1, a sweaty armpit