As part of Rendez-Vous Brussels Art Week, Galerie Zwart Huis presents El Pulso del Agua, an exhibition exploring the documentary and process-oriented dimension of the eponymous project by Belgian artist Nils Verkaeren (1980). Bringing together a selection of paintings alongside videos, field recordings, sketches, notebooks, photographs, and archival material, the exhibition offers a unique insight into eight years of artistic research carried out during expeditions across Colombia and other landscapes in South America.

Between 2018 and 2026, Verkaeren developed El Pulso del Agua through extended periods of work in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the Amazon region, Mavecure, and along the Río Magdalena, Río La Miel, and Río Cauca. What began as a search for isolation gradually evolved into an ongoing investigation into the relationship between painting, landscape, time, and natural processes.

While the paintings embody the material outcome of these experiences, the Brussels exhibition focuses on the process behind them. Alongside a selection of works, it presents videos, field recordings, sketches, notebooks, and archival material that reveal the physical and logistical realities of working in remote environments. Together, they show how observation, movement, and direct engagement with climate, terrain, and landscape shape the paintings themselves. Here, painting is understood not merely as a finished image, but as a physical practice in which experience, research, and natural forces become inseparable.

The Brussels presentation forms one half of a two-part exhibition together with El Pulso del Agua in Antwerp, where a large selection of monumental paintings is on view. While the Antwerp exhibition foregrounds the paintings themselves, Brussels offers insight into the artistic research and working process that underpin the project. Together with the accompanying publication, the two exhibitions provide an opportunity to reflect on eight years of working in and with the landscape.

Nils Verkaeren

Nils Verkaeren rarely works within the confines of a traditional studio. As a contemporary plein-air painter, he considers direct engagement with the landscape essential to his practice. Moving between painting and reality, he develops a visual language grounded in physical presence, observation, and sustained immersion in natural environments.

His work is driven by the constant transformation of landscapes, a dynamic translated into both monumental canvases and smaller wooden panels where time, movement, and experience are condensed into layered painterly surfaces. To deepen this relationship, Verkaeren repeatedly withdraws from urban contexts, travelling to remote locations where painting becomes physically demanding and inherently uncertain. These environments are not merely represented; they actively shape the work, leaving tangible traces on the surface of the paintings.

Rather than painting what he sees, Verkaeren paints what he experiences. By carrying his canvases through the landscape and exposing them to the elements, he develops a practice in which painting emerges through a continuous dialogue between artist and environment.