In Heart of Morocco
In the Heart of Morocco, an online viewing room dedicated to Nils Verkaeren's Presence of a Mountain series, created during his plein air explorations in Morocco. Extending his ongoing engagement with landscape as both subject and process, Verkaeren's paintings respond to the elemental forces of light, erosion, and time, capturing the mountain not as a static entity but as an evolving presence.
Presence of a Mountain
In Presence of a Mountain, Verkaeren continues his exploration of landscape as both site and subject. Working in Morocco, he navigated the region's shifting conditions, allowing the desert winds, filtered sunlight, and geological formations to dictate his painterly responses. The result is a series of works that move beyond representation, registering instead the ephemeral qualities of place-where erosion is as much a mark-maker as the brush itself.
These paintings reflect a process-driven engagement with the landscape, where Verkaeren's use of color and texture is guided by the experience of being present in the environment. The mountain becomes a register of time, each canvas a layering of observation and intervention. Unlike the tradition of plein air painting that seeks to capture a singular moment, Presence of a Mountain operates within multiple temporalities, embracing transition rather than permanence.
Verkaeren's approach resists passive observation. Instead, his compositions are built through movement, erasure, and reapplication, mirroring the ways in which landscapes are continuously redefined by natural forces. His use of earthy reds, ochres, and violets suggests an elemental connection to the terrain, while the interplay of light and shadow imbues the works with an atmospheric depth.
By engaging with the Moroccan landscape in this way, Verkaeren expands the dialogue between painting, place, and time-challenging the notion of landscape as fixed and instead emphasizing its constant state of becoming.
The online exhibition features a curated selection of paintings from the Presence of a Mountain series, alongside documentation of Verkaeren's working process in the Moroccan landscape. Installed against the very mountains that informed them, these works absorb the shifting conditions of light, temperature, and terrain, integrating environmental forces into their materiality.
About the Artist
Nils Verkaeren (b. 1980, Belgium) works within the plein air tradition, yet his approach extends beyond observation to a physical and immersive engagement with the landscape. His work has been exhibited internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at Kusseneers Gallery (Brussels), MMaison (Bogotá), and Galerie Lloyd (Ostend).
