Trees hold their form in wind. Animals coexist within ecosystems that have no interest in their individual survival. Botanical structures adapt to conditions that shift around them constantly, silently, without announcement. This is what balance looks like, Kennel seems to say: not stillness, but sustained response.
Her paintings unfold in spaces that feel contemplative rather than dramatic. Human presence is suggested rather than centered, allowing the natural world to occupy its own terms. Her paintings ask us to step aside.
Nature Ablaze (2016, oil on canvas) is a striking example. A bare tree rises through a landscape of red and orange, colors that read as autumn and as fire. Leaves lift from the branches and scatter across the composition. A vertical line of amber runs through the center of the canvas like a seam. The tree does not appear distressed, simply present.
This quality of presence runs through all of Kennel’s work. Her animals, when they appear, do not perform. Her botanical forms do not plead. They simply exist in conditions that are in some sense, extreme.
On Earth Day, that question feels like quiet instruction.
In the United States, Earth Day has long been a moment of collective reckoning, a date that asks us to look honestly at what we are doing to the environments that sustain us, and what we need to do differently. Kennel’s work doesn’t moralize. What it offers instead is something rarer: a sustained, unhurried attention to the natural world as it actually is: resilient, adaptive, and quietly extraordinary.
Born and based in Palermo, Sicily, Kennel trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Palermo and continued her studies at the International Schools of Graphic Arts in Venice and Urbino. EQUILIBRIUM marks her debut on an international online platform, a first encounter, for many viewers, with a body of work that has been quietly building its argument for decades.
We hope you’ll take the time to look.
EQUILIBRIUM is on view until May 11, 2026, online exclusively on Artsy.
