Laura de Coninck: Saudade

Visual artist Laura de Coninck expresses in images what her father - the unforgettable poet Herman de Coninck - captured in words. That is no mean feat, because both seek to convey a feeling, want to say the unsayable. You don’t have to stay silent about things you can’t say. You can and you must talk about them, and Laura de Coninck does that with verve.

Saudade is the untranslatable Portuguese word for a feeling of longing, which has Passion as its brother, Sorrow as its sister and Nostalgia as a parent. Laura loves words in general and this word in particular. We all have a rich emotional life, we all often feel emotions keenly and we are all familiar with a hopeless inability to put those emotions into words. Laura expresses herself in images, in pictures that tell stories about power and powerlessness, about strength and about the fragility of love. The emotional worlds her father could evoke with the right words, expressed in his own unique way, are evoked by Laura with equal authenticity in a sober interplay of line, image, ink and paper.