Sandrine Kern’s work is indicative of landscapes conjured by memory that communicate residual emotions to her viewers.
The thick surfaces of her paintings are built up through her unique alteration of a technique similar to encaustic. Instead of utilizing hot wax in her process, Kern combines oil sticks, oil paint, and cold wax to create a creamy, rich surface rifled with depth. She then further manipulates the surface through the reductive process of scraping away layers with a knife and solvents.
Kern places importance on the mood of each work by highlighting the surface luminosity through her use of a high contrast color palette. The highly suggestive representation of each natural element she depicts is void of details that define a specific tree, or a specific location. Instead, the paintings convey the essence of form but are still recognizably landscapes. For Kern, each painting represents the mood of a past moment, and contains a certain freedom of motion which keeps the work from appearing static.
