Nils Verkaeren, Blooming Desert.
A dialogue between painting, landscape, and time.
Buysse Gallery is pleased to announce Nils Verkaeren’s exhibition Blooming Desert at Cultuurcentrum Ter Dilft, Bornem.
The project unfolds as a dialogue between the artist and the surrounding landscape, enriched by performative dimensions that extend the act of painting into sound and presence.
The paintings of Nils Verkaeren bring nature close, yet never literally.
(“De schilderijen van Nils Verkaeren brengen de natuur dichtbij, maar nooit letterlijk.”)
He does not depict what lies before him, but what he endures: shifting light, dissolving mist, the persistence of drought, the struggle with the elements.
For Blooming Desert, Verkaeren worked at the Gloriëttehoeve in Weert (Bornem). Fruits were mixed into the paint, branches and trees return as recurring points of recognition. His canvases invite slowness, a renewed dialogue with landscape and time.
Together with soprano Elise Caluwaerts and art historian Eva Wuytjens, Verkaeren conceived a performative framework. During the exhibition, the audience contemplates a single painting in silence as music unfolds. Without phones or distractions, each song opens a new canvas. The paintings become a score, the music a key to concentration.
The title Blooming Desert encapsulates the paradox at the heart of his work: fertility and restraint, beauty and barrenness.
Opening Weekend
Saturday 27 September, 19:00 – Vernissage (free)
Sunday 28 September, 11:00 & 14:00 – Concerts among the paintings with soprano Elise Caluwaerts and pianist Monika Dars
Reserve tickets → LINK
⸻
Practical Information
Venue: Cultuurcentrum Ter Dilft, Sint-Amandsesteenweg 41-43, 2880 Bornem
Dates: 27 September – 30 November 2025
Admission: free (except concerts)
Blooming Desert
Nils Verkaeren – Exhibition at Cultuurcentrum Ter Dilft
27 September – 30 November 2025
The paintings of Nils Verkaeren bring nature close, yet never literally. As a contemporary plein-air painter, he does not simply render what lies before him. He paints what he feels during the long hours and days spent in the landscape: light shifting, mist lifting, drought gnawing, the struggle with the elements. His works are not impressionistic transcriptions but embodiments of experience and intensity — precisely the tension evoked by the title Blooming Desert.
For this project, Verkaeren remained exceptionally close to home. He worked in September at the Gloriëttehoeve in Weert (Bornem), a historic estate along the Scheldt. The landscape revealed a double aspect: trees shedding their leaves early, branches heavy with fruit, and beneath them soil that was not arid but rich and water-laden — clayey polder ground, fertile and promising. Yet little was visibly in bloom. The potential seemed hidden, withheld, as if the land delayed its own abundance. Since the Scheldt could not be seen from the estate, Verkaeren sought the river elsewhere. Its flowing presence entered the paintings as a counterpoint, a necessary balance to the land’s reticence.
This physical proximity is inscribed in the material itself. Verkaeren mixed fruit into the paint, letting the landscape quite literally write itself into the canvas. From close view, the works appear as abstract fields of rough strokes and sculptural surfaces of pigment. From a distance, trees, branches, and fruit emerge. One tree returns again and again — planted by the owner and his father — a living marker, charged with memory, yet as vulnerable as the rest.
Although often associated with Impressionism, Verkaeren’s work belongs to another lineage. From Frank Auerbach he inherits the conviction that paint may be heavy and tactile. With Joseph Albers he shares an attention to tone and nuance. The rhythm of gesture recalls Cy Twombly, the breath inscribed into the canvas. At times Gerhard Richter appears, with his question of when a painting is truly finished. Like Richard Diebenkorn, Verkaeren seeks the tension between planes, the fault lines where color, space, and time intersect. His paintings are not records of fleeting impressions but embodiments of struggle, rhythm, and duration.
His practice therefore raises a wider question: what can painting still mean today, in a time when photography, video, and digital media can endlessly reproduce every landscape? Verkaeren’s answer lies in slowness and intensification. His canvases are not images to consume but experiences that train the gaze in attention. In a culture of speed, the painting becomes a site of resistance, an exercise in looking.
The Gloriëttehoeve also makes clear that nature here is never pure. The garden, the trees, the river — all carry the traces of human intervention. In our regions there is no untouched wilderness, only landscapes that are at once natural and cultural. Verkaeren’s works expose this tension.
The title Blooming Desert encapsulates it all. It is a contradiction: bloom and desert in one breath. Yet precisely in this paradox — fertility and restraint, beauty and barrenness — lies the core of his work.
Together with soprano Elise Caluwaerts and art historian Eva Wuytjens, Verkaeren translated this vision into a performative concept. During Blooming Desert, the audience contemplates a single painting in silence as music unfolds. No phones, no distractions. Each song opens a new canvas. The paintings function as a score, the music as a key to concentration.
Blooming Desert invites us to slow down. To renew our dialogue with landscape and nature. To acknowledge fragility and resilience alike. Not as nostalgia, but as lived experience: a palpable presence that confronts us with the ongoing struggle that shapes both nature and art.
© Nils Verkaeren. Courtesy of the Artist and Buysse Gallery. Photographs © Thomas Kimmerlin Poupart.
