Berndnaut Smilde and the claim of the unstable to reality

Many artists work with instability.

Very few work with the claim the unstable has to be real.

It is along this second, narrower line that Berndnaut Smilde’s work takes its place. Not because his works are destined to vanish, but because they refuse to ground their reality in duration. Nimbus is neither a metaphor of the ephemeral nor a poetics of fragility: it is an apparatus of verification. What is at stake is not the work’s disappearance, but the possibility that something may be fully real without ever settling into a thing.

Smilde is not “the cloud artist.” He is the one who found a form capable of putting duration itself under pressure as a criterion of value. He builds events beyond dispute: physical phenomena produced under controlled conditions, achieved through the very parameters that regulate the “ordinary” air of buildings. In this sense, Smilde does not aestheticize instability; he stresses the assumption that the real must coincide with what remains.

The clouds that appear in his works are neither illusions nor symbolic images. They are precise physical episodes, generated through temperature, humidity, and air circulation. In works such as Nimbus Boijmans (2025), realized within a historically charged museum context, the cloud appears in spaces of stone, ceremony, and institutional display—places designed to endure, like Gothic churches or palatial interiors—where such an event would never occur on its own. Smilde takes the technical grammar that normally keeps an environment neutral and pushes it until it yields a presence incompatible with stability. He intervenes in the invisible syntax of space, turning functional infrastructure into an apparatus for appearance.

In Nimbus, the work does not linger as experience, nor does it stabilize as object. It happens. And in happening, it asserts itself as a fact: not an allusion, not an atmosphere. The event coincides with its own withdrawal; precariousness is not a limit, but the exact condition of its status.

This position places Smilde outside the enclosure—often comfortable and often reductive—of the aesthetics of the ephemeral. This is not about celebrating what vanishes, but about fracturing a deeper assumption: that only what lasts deserves the name of the real. Smilde operates on an ontological threshold, not a lyrical one. His question is not “how long does it last?” but “under what conditions do we recognize something as real?”

In this sense, his photography does not function as a tool for rescuing the work. It does not preserve what would otherwise be lost. Instead, it records a proof: it attests that something has occurred even though it cannot be retained. The image does not guarantee the memory of the event; it certifies its temporary existence. Photography thus becomes an act of attestation, not of conservation.

By choosing air as a medium, Smilde chooses a material without stable properties: without a form of its own, impossible to possess. And yet, for this very reason, radically concrete. Air is what makes the environment possible and, at the same time, what usually remains outside the field of vision. Giving it form means making perceptible not an object, but a condition. Nimbus does not introduce something into space; it renders space, for an instant, vulnerable and legible.

This is where Smilde’s work acquires a rare theoretical force. It does not merely produce powerful images; it redefines a criterion of value. Reality does not coincide with what endures; it can also exist as an event without guarantees, as a presence that does not aspire to become a thing.

Within an art system that tends to neutralize instability by turning it into style, Smilde performs the opposite gesture. He does not romanticize fragility; he claims its ontological right.

In Nimbus, Smilde does not ask us to believe. He asks us to revise the criterion by which we recognize what is. The work does not matter because it lasts, but because it was exact. In an era that mistakes recording for reality, Smilde shows the reverse: first comes the event, and only afterward—perhaps—the trace. His rigor lies here: separating truth from permanence, and forcing us to admit that even what does not last can be, without remainder.

Martina Gecchelin