In her landscapes, Sandrine Kern reduces tree-strewn sites with horizon lines that are high or low, to a few deft strokes of a brush. The work shows the sort of feelings towards a subject that one might look for in vain in a colossal picture. These feelings she expresses through allusions to trees, atmospheric effects, and workings of the soil. A literal figure to ground relationship. Each exhibits vigorous movements and tensions, tensions between swirling lines and a sudden, out-of-the blue articulation of a trunk or the contour of a cluster of leaves. It is these tensions that reflect the struggles of our daily life. Between form and chaos. Order and nothingness. Spirituality and, well, Scrooge-hood. Summer Hill, 24 x 48, express all that one needs to know about this landscape with a minimum of brushstrokes. Its well-worked surfaces suggest the erosion of time. The division of space in three horizontal bands — the earth, the bank of trees, and the sky–parallels medieval paintings’ divisions of heaven, earth, and hell and shows her ambit is cosmic even though its means are minimal. It’s not shorthand. It’s more of a moment of clarity in the flux of painting. Like Willem De Kooning’s "slipping glimpser," the sudden appearance of a tree trunk in a maelstrom of brushstrokes.
I contend that much of the art of our time is not user-friendly. Sure, something is there to be downloaded or expressed, some feeling, some thought, some insight — some data byte to be communicated. But it is not accompanied by the program necessary to understand it, feel it, share it. This happens with a lot of art. Something to share, something, but it doesn’t lend itself to comprehension by people who are not versed in advanced art theory or the latest art lingo. Are not part of the in-crowd. Not in-the-know. Perhaps this is because today a particular kind of art — self-expressive art — cannot be thought to justify itself. That it is out-of-date, outmoded, requires an excuse. That real art consists of an artist creating a new object and, in so doing, creates a whole new experience. The esthetic experience. What is excised from this equation, however, is whatever experience and feeling the artist puts into his work. One that awaits extraction by the viewer. This leads only to much of the potential audience for art of their time to be cut off from an otherwise vital experience. For, if we assume that art is an integral means of communication between one human, an artist, and another, the viewer, then art is not doing its duty. Instead, it only chases after the journalistic, the beautiful, the entertaining.
In this series of intimate (as in small size, not as in nude bodies) landscapes, Sandrine Kern assumes an ideal audience. She makes certain preconditions about it. Her audience is not an elite one whose chronological snobbery leads them to embrace the newest, the latest and, therefore, the most fabulous of cultural creations. Rather, her landscapes remind one that communication is not a bad thing.
