Light operates in Clive van den Berg's work as a theme, an object of representation, and a medium. It appears in the images of faerie lights, which hang above the landscape or from the furniture of intimate spaces in paintings and pastels - as glowing presences that suggest the need for communication but also the melancholy solitude from which this need grows. It takes the form of fire in the Mine Dumps installations, burning the surface of both land and eye with an urgent and primal force. At once ancient and industrial, the light that appears in the braziers conveys a power of metamorphosis that is intrinsic to culture but that also threatens to wound those who do not care for it.
And in the massive wood and light sculptures of the later Memorials without Facts and Love's Ballast, where the faeire lights have been replaced with naked household bulbs, light makes the work of art literally luminous.
Here, its searing presence testifies to the end of reflectionist representation, and casts the viewer in darkness, whence she or he looks - for signs and for those who might read them.