Four to the Floor: Nel Aerts, Bjarne Melgaard, Helmut Middendorf, Koen van den Broek, Carole Vanderlinden

Ketleer Gallery is pleased to present Four to the Floor, a group exhibition with works by Nel Aerts, Bjarne Melgaard, Helmut Middendorf, Koen van den Broek and Carole Vanderlinden.

"Four to the floor" refers to the steady 4/4 rhythm in which the kick drum hits every beat—a relentless, driving pulse that anchors the dancefloor. At once simple and forceful, it provides a constant structure that allows for variation, intensity, and disruption.

This exhibition at Keteleer Gallery translates that principle into painting. Four to the Floor brings together five artists who, each in their own way, work within—or against—systems of repetition, rhythm, and pictorial cadence. Their paintings operate like visual beats: at times strict and iterative, at others fractured and unstable, yet always carried by an underlying pulse.

Nel Aerts brings a playful, syncopated dissonance to her cartoon-like figuration, hovering between control and derailment. Bjarne Melgaard pushes rhythm toward excess and rupture, exposing what happens when the beat implodes into overwhelming chaos. Helmut Middendorf, rooted in Neue Wilde and 1980s Berlin subculture, channels raw physical energy—the brushstroke itself becomes an urgent, almost anarchic beat. Koen Van den Broek fragments landscape and architecture into recurring motifs—roads, shadows, edges—that shift and displace like visual downbeats. Carole Vanderlinden works at a slower, more introspective tempo, where color and form repeat as a quiet cycle of appearance and dissolution. Together, these artists construct a field of tension between order and disruption, repetition and deviation. Four to the Floor becomes a metaphor for painting itself—a medium that continually negotiates its own structures, conventions, and rhythms.

Image: Helmut Middendorf, Gasoline, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 50 x 60 cm