Metamorphoses

Van Keuren's experimental works invite the audience into a world of pure fantasy. These pieces are a bold departure from the conventional, combining elements of reality with unexpected features. In this way, the artist creates surreal, dream-like scenes that challenge our perception of the natural world. Using new photographic techniques and digital transformation, he constructs landscapes that are at once familiar and completely alien. His creativity reshapes the laws of nature.The new series of landscapes by the American photographer Victor Van Keuren are a cognitive experiment: They challenge our perception and raise the simple question of what we see.​The images open up views of heaven and earth melting into a distant horizon, they draw the eye into the wide range of a flowing landscape, a vision of recognizable terrestrial space. There is a familiarity here, we have all been there, whether we know these places from experience, or from televised documentaries of distant lands.​Set in the foreground of each is an object of peculiar shape and dimension, lingering, each one similar in kind but different in shape. It merges into the background and stands out at the same time. An object it is and we ascribe it three dimensions, it has a shadow projecting onto the ground below; a curiosity, an object trouvé, a meteor from outer space, a fossilized explosion, a crystallized rock formation, something that reaches out abruptly from a center into surrounding space. It is a nuanced thing, organic, energized and inexplicable to our cognitive faculties.​For want of recognition, we turn to van Keuren for an explanation, an answer. The answer is technical, rather than geological. We are looking at a computer-generated image of the very landscape in which the object is seen. Using a digital technique, the exact same digital image of the landscape we recognize, is translated and transformed into a three-dimensional highly original shape. Light and shadow unite and condense into an unrecognizable yet seemingly natural form which is per se no different to the sphere in which it is set. We are looking at a double image, sameness in difference. While the landscape opens up into an imaginative space beyond the edges of these photographs, each object converges upon a center, where it is energized and reaches out from an imaginary core.​Nature in digital images is in no way natural. The digital image creates an illusion of nature, which is morphed into its own metamorphosis: It is a metamorphosis in a literal sense, a change of appearance, not of essence. Sameness and difference are merged in these images to a curiously organic effect. We imagine ourselves - hunters and collectors at heart - coming across a marvel like the one captured and taking it home. There is something here that captures us and triggers our imagination, making these landscapes not only a curiosity, but an inspiration to look at./Dr. Maria von Kerssenbrock-Krosigk / Berlin