Desire, like death, and often in relation to death, is a sensuous force and a political question in all of Clive van den Berg's art. In his earliest paintings, he linked the experience of arousal with the drive to power. And he discerned that linkage on the frontier: in the phallic imagery of military monuments, and in the subterranean worlds of secret love in both the mines and the archives of South African nation-formation. The images that depict this often violent intimacy range in form and subject, but they are characterized by an unmitigated physicality. In the early landscape work of the Durban era, it is the land itself that is phallic, sexual and looming with potency. In the later acrylic paintings of Bringing up Baby (1998), childhood eroticism is set in the domestic space, but seen from without. In Frontier Erotics, the visceral mix of militarism and sexuality appears in the imagery of a naked man, sexually erect but clad in a yellow frock, on a border which is also the horizon where sky and earth meet. In the installations and videographic work of Men Loving (1986-1996), van den Berg pursues the brutal consequences of social taboos against both homoeroticism and homosexuality. More recently, however, he has turned to the question of eros in the age of AIDS, when the intimacy between love and death - between sex and death - has achieved a new and frighteningly literal dimension. In his artwork, this duality has as its counterpart the relationship between beauty and dread. So, for example, the presentation of the swollen gland in the large white "felt paintings" of Love's Ballast (2003-4), attempts, through the juxtaposition of what is beautiful with what is dreadful, to evoke the painful ambivalence of loving in the age of epidemic - avowing intimacy whilst revealing the finitude that makes such intimacy an act of courage.