PASCAL UNGERER

In his final book of essays, Experiments on Reality published in 2019, the late great cartographer-artist-geographer Tim Robinson situates his career as a painter alongside the development of an intense personal relationship with place. He coins the expression ‘topographical sensation’ to describe the potent impact of finding oneself in a physically transitive location such as on a mountain pass, or at the edge of an island, or in the middle of a lake.

 

I thought of Tim Robinson’s ‘topographical sensation’ when I first saw one of Pascal Ungerer’s paintings. Indeed, I experienced it. One of  the key essays in the book is called ‘Backwards and Digressive’ but there is nothing of either about Pascal Ungerer’s paintings. They are by contrast, visionary and relevant. They are not solely about the drama of the expansive view or the eye-catching perspective: they probe deeper into what is to be seen in the ordinary, drawing us into a new mode of seeing.

 

Pascal Ungerer is an acclaimed artist with a string of qualifications and accomplishments to his name. He takes a highly informed approach to his practice, which centres on what he calls ‘spatial cultures’, that is the relationship between people and place and how we, as people, effect our surroundings. “My paintings…” he has written “…often feature made-up places; I use different structures, social histories or topographies from certain areas as a starting point, and amalgamate them into a kind of fictional landscape that acts as a metaphorical space to reflect upon wider socio-geographic issues.”

 

Pascal Ungerer’s intense relationship with place and space takes us out to the liminal, the border, the edge of conventional view where we can, paradoxically, see more clearly – just as you see a cluster of stars more sharply in the night sky by slightly averting your gaze — ‘seeing slant’, to adapt a maxim of the poet Emily Dickinson. Looking at Pascal Ungerer’s paintings we enter a zone of heightened spatial awareness where the elements of the scenes take on an added intensity and significance that is the product of his extraordinary skill as a painter. We can find ourselves held between conditions of urban and rural, constructed and natural, human and inanimate. We are often held at a border, kept at a distance, left in a waiting room that becomes the destination. This duality is at once unnerving and liberating. We are unnerved because we can see the truth of the conflicts he depicts; and we are liberated because we believe we can better understand this universal state of marginality. Like all great art, Pascal Ungerer’s work affords us the privilege of seeing into the deeper nature of our lives here on Earth, and the life of the Earth itself. Neither apocalyptic nor dystopian, they challenge us to enter alien territories of transition and uncertainty. ‘You are neither here nor there’ as Seamus Heaney says in his poem Postscript, ‘A hurry through which known and strange things pass’. 

 

But there is also strong human dimension to the paintings. Among the ghostly traces of human occupation, the pylons, power lines, masts, tanks, pipelines and shaded housing blocks, we detect human connectivity and community. Added to this, or created by it, is an unmistakable sense of suspense, not dissimilar to the suspense which we lived in during the recent COVID 19 pandemic. A nervous isolation, an uncertainty where the largely man-made structures are unlikely survivors of time in their out-of-placeness, their struggle to assume a conventional purpose or identity. 

 

And there is hope also in these paintings: hope which emanates from a compassion for the marginalised, the outcast, the excluded, the things and maybe even the hidden, invisible people who exist somewhere in these no-man lands. Among the tinted settings and structures is sense of something valuable being held for the future or to be communicated or transported. From this compassion comes a comfort that all is not lost. Something like human hope seems to abide in and want to emerge from the luminous mists and clouds of these marvellous skies.

 

Pascal Ungerer has worked as a photographer in the past, and I admire the disciplined focus which is also evident in these paintings. He is a worthy disciple of Tim Robinson’s motto that ‘life is too short to accommodate more than one idea’. He is to be applauded for his dedication to a single and signal viewpoint across these works. 

 

These are paintings of enquiry, conflict and compassion and their combined skill and suspense is the stuff of great art.

 

JF 02.07.23