ARTIST STATEMENT
Philip Van Keuren

The diptychs shown here were made in New York City and are part of my Night Cometh series (1992-2008). I consider the diptychs to reveal a "selfsame tale." The phrase comes from dialogue between two characters in Cormac McCarthy's book The Crossing.

For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these also are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made.

I would like for my images to show "the joinery, the way in which the world is made." This is furthered by my use of the diptych format to create a kind of simile (figure of speech in which two unlike things are compared) and is best conveyed for my purposes by this sentence written by the American photographer Diane Arbus.

The world is a Noah's ark on the sea of eternity containing all the
endless pairs of things, irreconcilable and inseparable.

The Night Cometh series addresses issues of timelessness, luminosity, and the fleeting nature of existence, and in doing so hopefully makes a emblematic world of studied simplicity punctuated by quiet as well as the noetic suggestiveness of the world of real places and real things. My intent is to make works that are both visually entrancing and intensely personal webs of reverie and association that appear familiar yet ineluctably strange. It is my hope that, at their best, they may provide a calm respite in a period obsessed with complexity and size.

© Philip Van Keuren - All images