HackelBury Fine Art - The Estate of Pascal Kern

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‘What one remembers above all in Pascal Kern’s work are his splendid colour prints - tight knit, generally large-format photographs - works which are remarkable reflections on sculpture and the sculptural: imprints, moulds, positive and negative inversions, casts and casting.

Sculpture was his primary concern even though, paradoxically, he was best known for his photographic work. Sculpture is to be understood here in the widest sense of the word, that over the years took in printmaking, coloured crayons and pigments, installation, video, and what one could call a kind of archaeology of the vanishing world of the industrial age.

Today the originality and depth of Pascal Kern’s project have become clear. It is marked by an exacting search which continually pushed back the limits and explored in depth the possibilities offered by the different mediums he used, never bowing to passing fads and fashions. His work, which circumstances have now made available to us in its entirety, impresses us by its density and profound originality.

Régis Durand, Paris 2008

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 an almost iconic status; fascinated with the space created and occupied by the subject, and the purity of its form.

For Pascal Kern the elaborate creative process leading up to the eventual taking of the photograph was as essential to his artwork as the final image itself. The methodology he applied to his creations is evident at every stage of production, the final result being the sum of all its parts. For the series Nature, Kern cultivated each vegetable from seed. The subsequent plaster casts from these forms reveal the traces of time through the residue of luminescent colour that radiates out from the hollows. The lines created by the evaporated colour pigment reflect the growth rings of aged trees. The intrinsic elements of time and history are enhanced further by the weathered grain of the wooden frame, deliberately left outside to mimic the patina of the object encased within.

This meditation upon process and history is reinforced in the collection of industrial metal objects in Culture and Sculpture. The accumulation of inanimate objects, retrieved from disused factories and abandoned foundries, provides Kern with the raw material for constructing an elaborate fiction in which past and present are cohered into one final, original object: the framed artwork. Kern chooses seemingly worthless objects as his subject matter, assigning them a new purpose in his rigorously performed narrative.

It is through his meticulous labour, of which purpose and process are key, that the distinctions between Nature, Culture and Sculpture are brought into question. The lengthy procedures taken by Kern reveal themselves as the cohesive element within his oeuvre. The artwork is as much a reference to the objects themselves as it is to the performance that enables them to exist. Titles aside, the three series are ultimately all part of the same process, the same fiction, the same narrative: that of their creation and of their creator.

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 an 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 which negates fact and linear time. The framed artwork becomes a physical embodiment of the fiction sculpted by the artist.

Kern’s journey comes full circle from the conceptual beginnings of l'Usine à Bastos and Fictions Colorées to his final project in Luxembourg. Here he returns to his original source to closely examine the archaeology of the factory. Whereas much of Kern’s work is characterised by scrupulous preparation and arranged into grand tableaux, the Luxembourg images are simplified in their composition and presentation. Largely intended as single panels or diptychs, the concentrated forms and the vibrant colours suggest a lightness of thought and directness not found in previous series, and a distillation of his elaborate process. He discloses the fiction underlying his artwork by explicitly taking us to the site where the objects are found. He records not only the physical space, but the inherently beautiful traces of history and industrial process that he finds. The objects themselves are simply recorded back and front. The message is succinct, direct and profound.

As we gather together Pascal Kern’s complete oeuvre for the first time, we are now able to reconsider his artistic trajectory and acknowledge his contribution to the history of photography and art as a whole. We can access the entire collection, discovering new associations and insights that were neither evident nor possible during Pascal’s lifetime. Beyond his devotion to the plastic arts, Pascal was a storyteller whose stories were woven from time, reflection and action; his story can now be narrated to a wider audience, securing his unique position in art history.

Resume of exhibitions and collections

Introduction by Loic Malle

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