Galleries

 Olfactory art

The KMSKA perfume

for the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp

The KMSKA delights the senses even more with its own tabl’eau de parfum

Laura de Coninck: “The new KMSKA perfume olfactorily maps various themes from the museum and its collection through scent accords. Each accord consists of a balance of ingredients that evoke a different theme. The pleasure gardens often depicted in classical paintings are evoked with spicy, earthy, and fruity notes like carnation, apple, and rose. Smoky and sacred rituals are called to mind with hints of incense and fragrant myrrh, and the ingredients from the ‘holy oil’ recipe used for sacraments. The Rubens Skin accord uses a cloud of white musk with a touch of ambergris and cumin to bring the naked bodies of Ensor and Rubens to life, while modern molecules, musk, and sandalwood give it a transparent, contemporary touch that evokes the color white and also refers to the modern museum section.”

“Cedar and oak wood represent the parquet and paneling of the giant classic rooms. Gum resin– found in old varnish types – and natural turpentine from Cedarwood wood and pine bring the active painters’ studio to life.

Clair-Obscur

“The central theme is Clair Obscur: the interplay between light and dark that is often seen in artworks, but also in this building. There are the historic halls that everyone knows, to which a bright white section has been added during the renovation. There is the classical collection, but also modern art. This duality—between old and new, dark and light, past and future—is something I aim to reconcile in the fragrance. At its base, you'll detect deep, intense notes like incense and wood, but these are elevated by modern, transparent, fresh accords. One cannot exist without the other; heaviness and light need each other.”

l’Oeil et l’Esprit

2024

Deconstruction:

Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ idea is about what is both implicitly and explicitly present (in a text). The white space at the page edges and between lines of words create a paradox: what remains unsaid gains meaning through what is expressed. The unspoken, unthought, and forgotten elements shape a text into its essence. These Silences and blind spots contribute constructively to the text.

Quintessence

French filosopher Merleau-Ponty discusses ‘quintessence’ in painting. A painting distills a new visibility and world from reality. They say the painter grants visual existence to what eludes ordinary sight, offering a glimpse into a personal world—a second visualization—where the visual gains additional power. In ‘L’Oeuil et l’Esprit,’ it is suggested that a painting seeks to represent the invisible, capturing the spirit of things and their elusiveness. Their absolute presence (simultaneously absent) is revealed through the magic of seeing, inviting us to view the world differently, exploring various perspectives.

The unspeakable

Also Bell & Fry assert that art expresses the unspeakable, connecting us with a higher reality—a mystical experience. The artist possesses the ability to grasp a higher truth. Through art, we become aware of the true reality, the divine inherent in everything. The universal rhythm permeates all, bringing us in touch with the metaphysical (supernatural) reality. In this context, formalism grants the artist the power of interpreting the divine.

My approach is much more modest than that of Bell & Fry. I depict nature as it presents itself to me—I am merely the observer capturing it. Sometimes quite literally, by tracing a shadow as it falls on my canvas: the light between the leaves. But also the absent plays a role—the white spaces between the lines, here the gaps between the branches, just like Derrida gives the white space a meaning. By looking at things differently, structures emerge, abstractions take form, and figures come to the fore. They offer themselves as a kind of ‘codes.’ Decoding the blind spots, what isn’t explicitly stated… I capture what I ‘see.’  The visible is equal to the invisible. A sort of distillation of the absolute from my point of view… my unique perception of the world. A tribute to the metaphysical reality, as I perceive it—the divine and mystical presence of nature that permeates everything. And how eventually inner thoughts also coincide with outer perception.

The Blue Hour

2024 at Shame Gallery Brussels, Pop Up in Artchurch Rochus, Courtrai

The Blue Hour was a group exhibition of House of SHAME (formerly known as SHAME Gallery) curated by Nathan French, in collaboration with Art Church Rochus, renowned for its cutting-edge approach to art, it now showcases the forefront of Belgian art within the sacred confines of the desecrated gothic Flemish church, St. Rochus.

Through paintings, installations, sculptures, and performances, they invite viewers to explore the profound connection between the Blue Hour and human experience. In an era of technological advancements and societal change, artists play a vital role as interpreters and catalysts. Through their diverse mediums and perspectives, they provide insight into understanding the intricacies of their worlds. Artists: Nina van Denbempt - Laura de Coninck - Ellen Vrijsen - Shirin Nekou, Nathan french - Yann Laissy - Aron Mathe.

Pierrot in Turquoise

January 2021

“When curator Joanna de Vos asked me about a self-portrait of me as a clown, I immediately thought of this portrait in which I always recognized a Pierrot: in crying paint. Among clowns, I would indeed rather be the Pierrot. Not the screamer, "but with a heart with lots to say” (David Bowie): the declarer, thoughtful, deeply emotional, naive, sweet and loyal, ...

Olfactory art: below the painting is a little bottle, with the inscription 'Eau de larmes', in which I caught real tears. When we cry, it relieves, partly due to the fact that we also chemically excrete that energy in that secretion. Research has shown that the 'pheromones' in tears lower testosterone, making us more sensitive and compassionate. I like the idea of ​​people looking at my work with that chemical compound that softens them, with my pheromones and underlying emotion captured in those few drops in that little bottle.

In the end, what we do as artists is an attempt to 'sublimate' emotions, and to make our 'clown moves' (joy, desires,…) and also grief into something that people can come and watch.

The tittle ‘Pierrot in blue’ refers to David Bowies 'Pierrot in Turquoise’. “.

This painting in acryl and Indian ink is part of part of the ‘The Clown Spirit’ exhibition, curated by Joanna de Vos, exhibited in Rome in Mucciaccia Gallery in June 2023, next to Marina Abramovich, Jan Fabre, Sofie Muller, Jan Fabre, Guillaume Bijl, Tom Liekens, and so many more.

It is a traveling exposition that will be shown in different cities for 3 years.

Saudade for Herman

Juni 2021, in memoriam for my father Herman de Coninck

Nasi Per l’Arte

(Juni 2023)

RECOVERY OF THE GOOD OBJECT LOST

(April 2020)

In psychoanalysis, the term ‘the good object’ refers back to the blissful experience of our suckling at our mother's breast. When we realise that we do not coincide with the breast, we experience a traumatic loss. From then on we are ‘condemned to desire’. Life becomes a longing, a quest for ‘objects’ that can match that original symbiosis. Lacan calls that first object of desire: 'Objet Petit a’.

By evoking a positive experience about what we have lost, psychoanalysts believe we are partly able to heal this grief. And so I returned – with a wink – to this universal loss. You can see it as an answer to the ‘Saudade theme’: these are consolation installations to give comfort to a primal, universal loss at our basis.

OBJET PETIT a

(May 2020)

The giant fake-fur breast invites you to touch, but it is mainly its scent that takes you back to that primary source of happiness. The fur is infused with the smell of breast milk. The scent was created by the Laura in cooperation with master perfumer Sonia Constant and Givaudan Perfumes Paris.

Research has revealed that scents not only affect our mood, but can also have a healing effect. The injury to the breast is a play on significance: Is it the injury that life inevitably entails? Or is it a mutilation that reflects disaster and disease, a reference to the breast as a source of lust and life and thus also to destruction and death?

The title refers to a term of Lacan. He uses ‘Objet Petit a’ to designate both the object and the cause of desire. A baby literally internalizes the first love object by swallowing the mother's nourishing milk. Melanie Klein speaks of "the good breast. It symbolizes the satisfaction of a child's desires and primary needs. In a later stage of development, the breast can also literally become an object of sexual desire.

Mobile of desire

June 2020

Safe kissing tool

May 2020

The visual work I made during the lockdown questions that physical distance and its mental consequences. With comfort installations I played on the need for connection and touch. I made use of scents that have their origin in our collective subconscious and our memory. After all, smells are capable of arousing an extra dimension. They evoke memories and emotions and can even provoke physical reactions. This synesthesia allowed me to play multiple registers.

I’m very grateful my mentor, master perfumer Sonia Constant and Givaudan Perfumes, helped me in creating the mother milk fragrance with the most advanced Headspace technology and their expertise, so we had a pallet of mother milk molecules to start from, to then creatively complement.

The other works in this series also hark back to the oral phase, in which, as a result of separation from the mother's breast, we develop a libido, a thirst for satisfaction, love and desire.

'Social distancing' deprives humans of something fundamental and basic. This mouth with plastic cap forms a machine mouth for safe kissing. This immediately destroys all the magic of a kiss.

Olfactory paintings

These works are part of the 'Oral Phase' serie. They refer to the consequences of the separation from the mother's breast, through which we develop a libido, a desire and a craving for love and satisfaction. 

Condemned to desire

Strive is life

Man is a victim of his own desire. Our striving for peace, for unity and for constant satisfaction of those desires, keeps us moving and sets our goals. Paintings in acrylic and oil

Saudade - Watou 2019

Saudade

Saudade is a Portuguese and Galician word for a feeling of nostalgic longing for something or someone one loves, but has lost. It often has a fatalistic tone, and a repressed knowledge that the object of one’s longing might never return. It was once described as 'the love that remains after someone is gone’. 

Saudade is the recollection of feelings. It brings sad and happy feelings together: sadness for the loss, but some kind of happiness too, for having experienced that love. 

A lot of music in Portugal and Brazil is about Saudade, like the ‘Fado’. In Brazil they even have a day to celebrate Saudade on 30 January. They have a positive connotation with the therm, they are grateful they can feel Saudade and they think we don’t know that feeling because we don’t have the word in our language and it is not in our blood and culture. “But I think we do. Also without having a word for it, we all are familiar with it. A lot of artists share that feeling of missing that comes from love, and the burning ache that inspires them and makes them want to create something beautiful about what’s gone. Because it does make your heart sing, and this sad but beautiful melody wants to be heard and makes people want to write poems about it, paint about it,… And so do I” Says Laura.

To capture the abundance of the very intense feeling, Laura fragmentized all its different aspects and stages. When the word Saudade appeared to her, it was as if suddenly her inspiration found a denominator. It all fell together in this one, simple word. By that, also the feeling had got a place of existence. Our semiotic language system something can only exist when there’s a word for it, and you can name it. So Laura engaged herself to get the word into our Dutch language, described by linguists as the seventh most difficult word to translate.

Saudade is often compared to melancholia, but it’s different. We use melancholia to describe some kind of nostalgic wanderings, but in fact it’s a pathological condition, where you lose the interest in the outside world and the capacity to love. Like Freud wrote in his ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, melancholia is about missing something and not knowing exactly what you miss. More to compare with the ‘Weltschmerz’ Richter wrote about. Saudade has more similarities with the mourner. He do knows what it is that he is missing (this lost ‘Object of the good’, as Freud and Klein call it). The melancholic and the mourner both go through different and mad stages of minds before eventually recovering. With the difference the mourner is able to say goodbye to its ‘object of the good’. By keeping it alive, or recapturing it, recovery is possible.

Poet and writer Kim Stafford reacted on the treatment of traumatized patients, where they used a recovery of the lost good object, by reclaiming a lost positive experience:

“Writing a poem … is a way of distilling the best we have from the past and from present thought. Many things are taken from us, debased, destroyed. But by writing, by seeking to describe, evoke, bring to life the best we have, we find a way to survive loss by cherishing what remains.”

For Laura, her drawings claim to do the same. It’s a way of creating something new with the feeling of loss of something good, in an attempt to fill in the gap and heal it.

With the Saudade exposition Laura did a performance and an apply to the journalists, the press, and the visitors, to become ambassadors of the word, and to spread it. Because when enough people walk in the same direction a road is formed, and when enough people use a word, sooner or later it will become part of the vocabulary and dictionary and it will have a right of existence. And people will exactly know what you mean when you say, I feel ‘Saudade’.

Synesthesia: a combination with scents

The book

Brunhilde Borms of publishing agency Borgerhoff & Lamberigts wanted to make an art book with a selection of Laura’s saudade works. The book launch was presented at the opening of the Watou exhibition. The book was released in Belgium in July, and in September it was already translated in English and available in a few art book- and museum shops in Europe.

 Performance

To reinforce the impact of the word Saudade, Laura tried to come up with sentences that explore or shape the word. But all attempts were doomed to failure, for no combination of words is as comprehensive and sufficient as that one word itself or as the reality to which it refers. Laura wanted to demonstrate with that we need the word itself, and by that to also give the feeling a place in our existence. In our language and in semiotics in general (the study of sign and signals that create communication), something can only exist from the moment we have a word for it. The moment we can name it, and you can capture it, it has the right to exist.

 So in addition at the opening, the publishing House organized an auction as a performance, to sell these musings (sentences) that the word evokes. The buyer gets a print in rotogravure of that gem, with a stamp in his book (pushed into the page by pressure, so the letters are pressed in, with depth). No stamp of ink, but a print of what is missing, the ephemeral. A souvenir of what is gone. You can find some pictures on my blog.

The words are deliberately not printed in ink because they are merely a representation of an idea, a search for its appropriate meaning. The visual art work is the actual and final artwork, not the words behind it.

saudade - 2018

Surrender 44 x 54 cm (€1400)

We don't have a word for saudade in Dutch. It's said to be the seventh most difficult word in the world to translate. Laura wants to get the word included in the Dutch dictionary. For that to happen journalists and people in general will have to use the word and publish it as often as possible.

Wanderlust

Laura: “It’s never black and white from my point of view, there’s always a bit of both at the same time. I can feel very happy and still feel sorrow at the same time. Let’s say it’s like poetry inside, there’s rain and sun at the same time, but always that colourful rainbow lighting up too…”

Conversation in blue - 2017

In 2017 a new exhibition followed for Sd Worx in Antwerp: Conversation in Blue. This time it was not to accompany poems but to showcase Laura’s own work inspired by the theme honesty. Honesty is one of the qualities Laura values most, although it is not always easy to put into practice. It takes courage and can cause a lot of harm too. A confession with good intensions can assume different proportions. And instead of giving confidence it can create distrust. People can be very judgmental, words can come across harsher than intended, be misunderstood, or be about things that are so painful that you would rather keep them to yourself. Because about some matters you simply can not judge if you haven't experienced them yourself. Truth is not one thing. It can be black and white at the same time. As everything in life, it depends on interpretations, the perception and the meaning we give to it. We can only try to explain what we believe and feel, but words often seem to come to short. How can you capture in language what you can not capture for yourself?

In Conversation in Blue Laura uses images to try to come up with a truth that is more all-encompassing. She tries to evoke a feeling that communicates very gently about difficult to discuss topics. A conversation without words. In a language that is universal. About the fragility of love. About the fine lines between guilt and innocence, lies and truth, silence and speaking out, secret and confession.

Laura: ‘My mother Lieve Coppens is a psychologist, specialised in trauma counselling. She advises her clients to write down their thoughts. This helps them to distance themselves from them, so they can get a grip on them and gain some insights. Because the theme I was working on was so personal, confusing and overwhelming, I had to write down lots of material before I was able to translate my emotions into paint (I experienced a kind of painters block, all I could do was cry when I faced the waiting canvas). To make the works as honest as possible, I worked some of these diary excerpts into a few of them. Some of the titles also refer to the notes I made. Certain works were a real struggle: a few literally have my tears on them; others I ripped into pieces, and so I had to start all over; and one has the marks of a broken pencil point, because I attacked it,’ she laughs."

What about the conscience's conscience? 

Also in 2017 Galerie Van Caelenberg in Aalst – curated by Jan Hoet Jnr – invited Laura de Coninck to hold an exhibition. This exhibition included some works from Conversation in Blue, supplemented with new work. Jan Hoet Jnr is a big name in the Belgian Art world. He is following in the footsteps of his father Jan Hoet. Jan was one of the world’s leading art experts. For more than a quarter of a century he was curator of S.M.A.K, Ghent’s Municipal Museum for Contemporary Art.

One of the works included in this exhibition, 'If eyes could speak', was chosen to be shown at the Watou Arts Festival 2017.

A Thousand Questions

Paintings

The Ink

Miss the blue, Paint the blue

The Thin line

watou - 2014

Laura was also a guest at Watou in 2014. For that edition she painted in thick etching ink on paper to accompany text excerpts from Bernard Dewulf’s Kleine Dagen (Small Days) and Flikkeringen (Flickerings).

kunstenfestival Watou - 2013

In 2013 Laura was invited to the prestigious Watou Arts Festival, for which she created visual work to accompany her own selection of her father Herman de Coninck's poems. Nine large and six small works were exhibited in the Doeviehoeve’s hall of fame. They were a kind of monotype (one-off print) in which the drawn line has an ink print on the recto side. ‘My aim was to say as much as possible, using only the most sober line. I was looking for a technique that would allow me to relinquish control and draw purely from my intuition, purely from feeling: a line, a shadow, with here and there a coloured surface, nothing more. Chance does the rest.’ Laura likes to call these her 'schilderingen': a kind of drawing done in paint.

To the Letter

Laura’s Watou works were included in her exhibition in Huis Happaert, in Antwerp. For this she once again drew her inspiration from her father's poems: ‘I would never have used my fathers words by my own initiative. I never wanted to use his work and name to promote my own. But when Watou invited me to make artworks by a selection of his poems, it was an offer I couldn't refuse. It was very therapeutic for me, every new work was a relief. The poems are mostly also about my own life: my parents’ divorce, the love for my mother, stepmother, brother, me, ... so I was creating work that was partly autobiographical. I was rendering in paint how I myself had experienced those poems and situations. It felt as if my image and his words touched each other in some way.’ At the vernissage Bernard Dewulf read from his wonderful work. Naar de Letter was also exhibited at ’T Schaliken in Herentals. 

Laura: "The connecting thread of this exhibition is that the paintings always accompany poems or text excerpts: a kind of translation of the text into visual language. The title Naar de letter (To the letter) completes the circle. These are the final words of the poem Slaapliedje voor Laura in Gigaro (Lullaby for Laura in Gigaro) that my father wrote for me and about me. You can see my drawings as a response to his poems. I knew him as father not as poet, but the beautiful words he left behind are an inexhaustible source of comfort. People sometimes tell me I make poetry with images, well, that's the best compliment anyone could give me."

To translate a poem truly, is as good as impossible; it becomes plain and loses its sparkle. This poem is a father’s comforting blessing to his little daughter.

This is a rather literal (and very rough) quick translation:

Lullaby for Laura in Gigaro

One million fish are silent

and thereby sleeps the sea.

May you not have two thousand thoughts

to sleep beneath.

(I had them for you, and different shades grief.

They weren’t worth it.)

And may you awaken to the song of birds.
God is freely translated as the Word,

but this is to the letter.

Slaapliedje voor Laura in Gigaro

Eén miljoen vissen houden zich stil

en daardoor slaapt de zee.

Moge jij een paar duizend gedachten 

niet hebben, en daaronder slapen. 

 (Ik heb ze voor jou gehad. En soorten verdriet. 

Ze waren de moeite niet.)

En moge je ontwaken door vogelgekwetter.

God is vrij vertaald in het Hebreeuws,

 maar dit is naar de letter.