Art Island 2025
We are pleased to announce our debut at ArtIsland 2025 with a dual exhibition featuring works by Emmanuel Barcilon and Steffen Kern. These two artists, distinct in medium and approach, are connected by a shared interest in memory and human experience, each creating a strong visual impact.
At first glance, Emmanuel Barcilon’s works appear as dense fields of color. With time, they reveal a quieter, more contemplative quality. Built through numerous layers of poured pigment, each painting results from a slow and deliberate process that can take several months to complete. Every layer both conceals and reveals the ones beneath, producing a subtle play of transparency, tension, and contrast. This visual depth draws the viewer into what feels like an endless space that is soothing and intimate. His surfaces in this new series of works balance horizontal fluidity and the quiet pull of gravity, introducing a sense of movement and tension within the otherwise tranquil fields of color. This mist-like layered process gives the paintings a spatial complexity that feels both infinite and immediate, creating abstraction with the tactile feeling of depth and distance.
Born in Paris in 1967, Barcilon studied at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Cergy and has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States, including at the 56th Venice Biennale.
Steffen Kern takes a different approach, constructing complex inner worlds using pencil and charcoal on paper. His process combines traditional drawing techniques with visual strategies drawn from photography. He explores elements such as focus, light, shadow, and distortion to create images that feel familiar yet elusive. Working in both vivid color and monochrome, Kern creates scenes that resemble memories or fragments of dreams. His subject matter often includes references to film, domestic life, and cultural imagery, all reinterpreted through his distinctive lens. By working without photographic references, he accesses a more intangible and universal visual language that blurs the line between fiction and recollection.
Born in Germany in 1988, Kern has developed a highly personal drawing style that reflects the overwhelming presence of images in modern life, while remaining rooted in the discipline of classical draftsmanship.
At ArtIsland 2025, we invite visitors to engage with these parallel explorations and to experience the quiet intensity each artist brings to their work.
