Body: skin, bone, gland. Art is a technology of the sensuous. It is the means by which we extend the body's capacity to experience the world, and it is the means by which we come to know our own bodies - as the scenes of pleasure, pain, fear, desire, revulsion, and dissipation. For Clive van den Berg, art must do more than represent the body as surface; it must evoke its trembling interior and give form to those experiences which take place on the border between inside and outside. Hence, his choice of media is closely linked to the dimension of bodiliness that he is attempting to call up in any particular work. The soft, palpable mark of pastel on paper conjures the vulnerability of skin, but also the fleshiness and soft tissues of the organic, even when he is portraying the seemingly inanimate environment. Indeed, the use of this tender medium permits van den Berg to discover and reveal the presence of the organic in the inorganic, as with the images of The Bluff or Views from the Oasis, and Excavations. But bones are also omnipresent in the skeletal figures that weigh down his beds or harass his urban landscapes (as in Urban Futures, 2000). In the paintings, the contrast between the dry austerity of skeletal imagery and the layered translucent hues of watered acrylic in which it appears generates an aura of the ghostly, the spectral and the fugitive, making bone a figure not only of the body in its ruined state but also of memory and forgetting. Van den Berg’s bodies are at once transcendent figures and emphatically historical ones. Increasingly, his bodies are afflicted by signs of epidemic. The imagery of the gland has not only come to signify vulnerability in the time of AIDS, but it has become a node for association. Hence, in the works produced at the time of Memorials without Facts, and since, the gland is a general figure of trauma - as the injury which comes from without but lodges itself within a body. It evokes the round beads of light that traverse so many of the works and the white-washed stones that signify memorialization. Finally, it resonates with the black counters of the abacus, those signs of counting and of the need for accountability that have become so important to van den Berg's work since Love's Ballast.