Stephan Keppel’s selection and multiplication of the details of images reveal each component – whether a recognisable whole or abstracted fragment – to be its own point of origin and departure. Details, textures and glyphs construct trajectories, entering into and occupying space, notably resisting the compression of photographic images, as well-behaved, flat, industrial surfaces (whose presence and matter is concealed often by dark storage for prints and the distant sites of server farms). Keppel’s works Copy Series: Hard Wrapped foreground the observation, selection, multiplication and transformations of the image as it recurs, presented in clusters or sequences of shifting panels. Editing and printing sees the image move through magnifications and extractions until new forms emerge and the contingency of one image upon the others almost snaps. At this stage, the image begins to act in space, the image-fragment developing architectural scale and a physical impact that is felt by the body as much as by the eye. As graphical markings at once descriptive of and within the world, they break the photograph’s dematerialised virtuality to become concrete, sensory and continuously in progress.
With the abstraction and multiplicity of the image in the foreground, Jones and Keppel bring us closer to the materials, gestures, and lives of images. Against a slippery and rapid redundancy of the image, they propose a layering of sensitivities, traces, and accumulating marks which shed and accrue information in their contact with the world. Open not only to evidence or presentism (the here I am, right now), but to extended durations and an open-ended becoming, they begin to model the possibilities of what the image might be.
With thanks to Duncan Wooldridge, Benjamin Jones and Stephan Keppel for this text, which accompanies Post No Bills, an exhibition by Benjamin Jones and Stephan Keppel (16 September – 23 October 2022) at The Koppel Project Hive, London. Benjamin Jones images: courtesy the artist and LOOM Gallery, Milan. Stephan Keppel images courtesy the artist.
STEPHAN KEPPEL 