Saudades

Encaustic and Oil on Wood Panel. Unframed 16"x16" / 40cm x 40cm

Saudades by American-Argentinian artist Miguel Perez Lem unfolds with the quiet gravity of a memory trying not to fade. Set against the warm, subtly mottled surface of a wood panel, the cropped female torso emerges in soft chiaroscuro with remarkable intimacy. By withholding the figure’s face, Perez Lem transforms the body into a vessel for memory—intimate yet elusive, present yet receding.

The artist employs a layered technique that begins with charcoal drawing on the wood panel, the sinuous anatomy articulated in deep, velvety strokes. Over this, he applies oil paint, letting the skin’s luminous gradations bloom from the charcoal’s groundwork. A final layer of encaustic settles across the surface like a translucent veil, imparting the sensation that the image has been suspended in time—fragile, preserved, and touched by nostalgia.

The word saudade—that untranslatable Portuguese term for yearning steeped in tenderness—becomes the lens through which the entire work is perceived. Running vertically along the right edge of the composition are the delicately inscribed lyrics from “Saudade de Você” by Coquetel Diamante. The included line, “eu mato o tempo desenhando seu rosto num pedaço de papel,” acts as the emotional axis of the piece. Translated loosely as “I kill time drawing her face on a scrap of paper,” the phrase becomes a whispered confession, a poetic trace of someone no longer physically present but continually revisited through memory and imagination.

The tattoo-like motif curling along the figure’s hip introduces a rhythmic, almost calligraphic counterpoint to the softness of the skin. It anchors the image in personal history while hinting at the stories carried in and on the body.

Altogether, Saudades is a work steeped in tenderness and presence with absence. Perez Lem captures the complex ache of remembering: how we return to the ones we miss, how their image lingers, and how even in the act of forgetting, we draw them back into being.