Bringing together works that continue his decades-long meditation on land, memory and the unseen forces that settle within a place, Remnant foregrounds Van den Berg’s intuitive, gestural approach to painting as a form of unearthing. In these works, landscape becomes both site and process, a mutable field in which meaning is continuously negotiated rather than resolved. What appears on the canvas often feels provisional, held between what is remembered and what resists articulation.
Van den Berg has long viewed landscape as a terrain shaped by the past and its echoes. He approaches land not as a neutral expanse but as a repository of lived experience, marked by what has occurred, what has been forgotten, and what lingers unresolved. In Remnant, he deepens this enquiry through surfaces animated by sweeping gestures, shifts of colour and textured passages that gather and fall away. Paint functions as a means of sensing rather than illustrating, allowing forms to emerge through an interplay of intuition, atmosphere and memory.
A recurring idea within Van den Berg’s practice is that of ‘fugitive marks’, the lingering traces of past events embedded within the land. These subtle prompts, whether a rise in the earth or a scatter of stones, drift between recognition and obscurity. Rather than reconstructing fixed narratives, the artist responds to such vestiges with a visual language that moves between abstraction and allegory, permitting the unresolved nature of the past to remain open.
The works in Remnant do not present definitive views of place. Instead, they operate as speculative maps, guiding viewers through imagined geographies where temporal layers converge and shift. Marks accumulate, disperse and reappear, echoing the changing ways in which memory settles within land. These landscapes are shaped as much by what is absent as by what is present, revealing terrain that remains in motion, caught between emergence and dissolution.
In this way, Remnant reflects Van den Berg’s ongoing engagement with landscape as a living archive, one marked by continual transformation. The paintings offer spaces of reflection rather than resolution, inviting viewers to consider how the traces held within land persist, reconfigure and quietly shape the ways in which place is understood.
Join us on Saturday the 21st of February at 11:00 for a walkabout with the artist. Entry is free and all are welcome.