SPLASH - PHILIPP KEEL: ZURICH

Philipp Keel allows himself to be surprised by the magic of the fleeting moment and records what he sees: chance encounters, everyday occurrences. His aim is not to reproduce reality but consciously to alter it by alienating or reducing it. The viewer needs to look precisely because the apparently normal becomes distorted in Philipp Keel's images.

 

A picture can be taken in a matter of seconds, but subsequent work on the image in the laboratory can take months, or even more than a year. Philipp Keel devotes himself to this process with experimental fervour and a meticulousness bordering on obsession. In the process, he imbues form and colour with an intensity that abstracts the commonplace.

Leaves floating on water cast shadows, a woman's pale, white legs dipped in a pool, the shimmering heat of the Sierra Nevada beyond the car window, or a glowing Ferris wheel vibrating before our eyes: Philipp Keel's work brims with poetry: at once beautiful yet mysterious.

 

«The works in Splash circle more around a discipline, a quest for authentic form, which finds it's origins in painting traditions. The operative means, by which the relativity of the pictures is constructed, generate the photographic tropes of restraint. The photographs are convincing and captivating precisely because they reveal themselves to be just pictures, made from relative representations of the phenomenal.»