Clive van den Berg

Aquifer II (Flow), 2023

With ‘Aquifer II (Flow)’, Clive van den Berg continues his long-standing exploration of the underground as both a physical and psychological site. Rooted in personal memory yet reaching into the broader terrain of South African history, the work evokes an unseen world shaped by excavation, displacement, and forgetting. The aquifer, in this context, becomes a potent metaphor for the submerged narratives that lie beneath the surface – those shaped by personal inheritance, colonial extraction, and ecological disregard.

‘Aquifer II (Flow)’ is not a literal rendering of the landscape, but a cartography of submerged histories and emotional intensities. The work channels the artist’s interest in what is concealed – geological, ideological, or emotional. Through abstraction, Van den Berg resists traditional pictorial language, allowing instead for rupture, seepage, and uncertainty. Each mark, each shifting field of colour, gestures toward forgotten bodies, silenced geographies, and the ethical questions that linger in the aftermath of extraction. The result is a surface that holds memory like sediment, layered and unresolved. Here, painting becomes a form of excavation, and the canvas a site through which personal and political pasts flow into the present.