Shades of Smoke (2025) is a generative artwork by Stefano Contiero created in collaboration with Benriach and Here Design for Benriach’s 31 Year Old Edition One, the first release in the distillery’s limited edition series of the same name. The work translates the whisky’s layered sensory character into color, gesture, and painterly motion.
The artwork developed from a tasting with Benriach Master Blender Rachel Barrie. Instead of assigning literal images to individual flavors, Contiero created an algorithm in which feathery marks gather, break apart, and sweep across one another. Coral, orange, pink, violet, blue, and earthen brown move through broad areas of pale cream, alternating between open passages and concentrated bursts of color. The composition appears by turns weightless and dense, echoing the gradual emergence of fruit, spice, sweetness, and gentle peat during the tasting experience.
This translation of flavor into movement continues Contiero’s interest in giving intangible experience a visual structure. Where Battito (2023) transformed biological rhythm into an evolving image, Shades of Smoke treats taste, aroma, and maturation as materials that can be interpreted through time. Its gestural surface recalls the physical energy of postwar abstraction, but the marks are generated through code, allowing a single digital composition to hold many shifts in pace, density, and chromatic intensity.
Introduced in winter 2025, the collaboration brought together Barrie’s work with the liquid, Contiero’s generative process, and Here Design’s translation of the artwork across the bottle and presentation case. Cropped moments from the composition create related but distinct surfaces, allowing the work to move between screen, label, and object without becoming a decorative pattern. Like the whisky itself, the image reveals its character gradually. No single passage contains the whole experience, and the viewer must navigate its changing densities to understand how the parts form a layered whole.