Clive van den BergMirage I, 2025
Clive van den Berg’s landscape paintings are not depictions of specific places, but conceptual terrains that make absence perceptible. His canvases move between the seen and the suppressed, drawing on the land as a porous vessel of memory, rupture, and longing. Through gestural brushwork and layered abstraction, Van den Berg explores the spaces where history lingers without resolution. The landscape, like the body, becomes a site that absorbs and holds what cannot be spoken – shaped by political trauma, ecological extraction, and personal memory.
In ‘Mirage I’, as in much of his work, Van den Berg navigates the threshold between presence and loss. His painterly language resists fixed meaning, instead proposing a map of what is felt rather than what is known. These imagined topographies suggest a constant interplay between past and present, where colour and texture evoke the sediment of time. The result is a visual space that invites reflection, allowing the viewer to encounter what has been buried, suppressed, or forgotten within the folds of the land.
