Pascal Kern
b. 1952, France
d. 2007
Born in 1952, Pascal Kern lived and worked in Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne. For much of his career, Kern used photography to produce sculptures‘ which explore the question of volume in all its aspects: the relationships between volume and surface, fullness and emptiness, mass and colour, depth and contour.
Using found or natural forms, he elevated the everyday to almost iconic status; fascinated with the space created and occupied by the subject, and the purity of its form. The enigma of Kern‘s artwork lies in his questioning of the boundaries of sculpture, photography, fiction, and function. His unique artistic language defies categorization, placing both the artist and his creations within alternative art history. His work does not refer solely to the past nor to the present, rather it is an insight into the journey realised by the artist and his chosen object. The reinforcement through theme and scale of the former utility of these objects underscores Kern‘s fascination with a history of purpose and the means of recounting that history through art.
The presentation of the life-size cibachrome photographs as diptychs, triptychs or polyptychs underscores the sculptural element of the work. Kern‘s preoccupation with presenting an all-encompassing view of the object and the space around it speaks as much to what is absent as to what is viewed directly within the frame. By carefully indicating with precise details how the artwork should hang, Kern anchors his fiction within a physical domain. The artwork is written into history as evidence of a creative process that negates fact and linear time. The framed artwork becomes a physical embodiment of the fiction sculpted by the artist.