El Relato #7 / Pascal Ungerer / The Anthropomorphic Ruin
Spectres of an Invisible Sun, 2020, 100 x 100 cm, Oil on Linen / Pascal Ungerer
There are several keystones within my practice that I constantly refer to. They often act as a starting point or sometimes as an undercurrent within much of my work. They are primarily: alterity, peripherality, abandonment and decay.
I think one of the reasons I am often drawn to these areas is because I grew up in a very marginal habitat on the edge of Europe on the south-west coast of Ireland.
I have always been fascinated by ruins and there connection to place. Much of rural Ireland has suffered from cyclical rural depopulation over many generations, leaving behind a lot of abandoned buildings and farmsteads and they have almost become synonymous with the vernacular of rural Ireland, so for me the idea of abandonment is also intrinsic to the ecology and spacial culture of the rural.
Temporal Light, 2021, 90 x 90 cm, Oil on Linen / Pascal Ungerer
The Anthropomorphic Ruin By Pascal Ungerer
Ruins often exist in a stasis between construction and neglect, between habitation and abandonment and between use and disuse.
They are peripheral and marginal, often clinging to the edges of the built world, as an ‘other’ or alternative landscape.
They are pervasive and invasive. There ruinous dereliction can metastasise, enveloping surrounding areas, like a foreign body infecting its host. I’ve seen this kind of dereliction spread and take hold in many towns and cities as it slowly creeps its way down the high street or the industrial parks at the edge of town.
One could look at ruins as being prosaic, a banality of the everyday, but it is there eccentricity and unpredictability that contradicts this assumption. They are unhinged, untethered and ungrounded. They are self-perpetuating organisms, at ease within there own degradation and inevitable demise.
They are interlopers, they are subversive. They usurp there own function and place history as they undermine there original design.
Ruins are misanthropic, they act as a counterpoint to the built world and to human intentions. They are connected to the ecology of land, slowly subsumed by all around them as they relent to the vicissitudes of nature and the sovereignty of there own destruction.
They are portents of an uncertain future with there foundations set in a past that no longer exists. Ruins are a testament to time and decay.
Ruins have a voice, it is a quiet voice that whispers in the shadows. If you listen carefully you can hear it, this reverberating noise that oscillates within empty space. An interminable drip echoing on broken glass. It creeks and groans like an ancient tree. It is the wind stealing through a broken pipe, hissing its escape. It is the sound of a distant past as the place memory of its crumbing walls bear witness to ancient secrets and untold stories, while the last flecks of crumbling paint fill another strata of time as it continues its slow and inexorable journey to dust.
Ruins are dark, a crack through broken glass or a hole in a boarded window allows the occasional glint of light to penetrate the void for a brief moment of reprieve.
Ruins are resilient and unyielding. They are distant and remote, they are secretive and peripheral. Ruins are limenil and interstitial. They are always on the cusp and at the edge of things.
Ruins are mortal, the cracks and sinews of there decay maps there journey through time and space, like an arterial body slowly dragging these structures ever closer to the sedimentation of there own demise.
Pascal Ungerer is a visual artist from Cork. In 2019 he relocated to Ireland after three years in London where he completed a fully funded Masters in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University.
He works primarily with paint but has a background in lens based media and has screened his video work extensively throughout Europe.
His paintings are primarily concerned with spatial cultures in relation to peripherality, social history and geo-politics with an emphasis on place and the built environment. He has a particular interest in obsolete structures on the margins of urban development and in rural hinterlands, as well as areas of post-industrialisation, ecological degradation and rural de-population.
Throughout his practice he examines in-between spaces that lie at the intersection of the urban and rural. This liminal and interstitial terrain has become a focal point for much of his recent painting. Central to this is an interest in dystopic topographies and places that are devoid of people that often exist in a temporal and finite state of impermanence.
In his painting work he uses different structures, social-histories or topographies as a starting point and amalgamates them into a fictional landscape as a way to reflect upon wider socio-geographic issues. Though his paintings primarily depict imagined landscapes they are also intrinsically linked to the places and stories that inspire them.