Panda and I
Panda and I
PAINTING DESCRIPTION
In Panda & I, Tobias Keene presents a child holding a stuffed panda against an undifferentiated black ground. The absence of setting removes narrative context, concentrating attention on posture and gesture. Black functions as a structuring field, suspending the figure between reassurance and exposure. "Panda and I" is part of the body of work - "Held within Black" - in which containment and stillness are used to examnine how identity is shaped within limiting conditions.
MEDIUM
Oil on Board
INCHES
60h x 48w
CENTIMETERS
152.4h x 121.92w
FROM "THE BLACK PAINTINGS"
ABOUT THE BODY OF WORK
The Black Paintings — Formation in an Age of Migration
The Black Paintings examines identity not as inheritance alone, but as an ongoing act of formation.
The works emerge within a contemporary moment defined by unprecedented global migration: populations moving from South America to North America, from Africa to Europe, across the Mediterranean, across deserts, across borders both visible and ideological. Entire histories are being displaced, re-rooted, and re-negotiated in foreign terrain.
In such a climate, heritage becomes unstable.
Tradition is no longer geographically anchored. It is carried in the body.
Gesture becomes archive.
Posture becomes memory.
Ritual becomes portable.
Keene’s figures do not depict migration literally. Instead, they occupy a psychological terrain shaped by it. The black ground operates as both void and origin — a pre-cultural field from which identity slowly materializes. It is not decorative darkness; it is ontological space.
The figures seem to emerge rather than pose. They are not fully fixed. Their edges dissolve. Their presence is provisional. This instability mirrors the condition of cultural negotiation: Who am I when removed from inherited ground? What remains when lineage is severed from place?
Importantly, these works resist nostalgia. They do not idealize the past. Instead, they examine the mechanics of formation itself — how identity is assembled from memory, influence, discipline, rupture, and reinvention.
In an era of border crossings and fractured belonging, The Black Paintings suggest that identity is neither abandoned nor preserved intact — it is re-formed.
Darkness, here, is not erasure.
It is the space in which something new becomes possible.