Margarita Cappock | pascalungerer

Pascal Ungerer specialises in contemporary landscape painting that features peripheral landscapes or abandoned places situated on the ‘edgelands’ or margins of human habitation. His aim is to ‘challenge normative perceptions of landscape paintings through the prism of unusual structures and topographies.’ The artist’s primary thematic concerns are places that represent ‘otherness’. He is drawn to obsolete or decommissioned post-industrial structures that speak of the interrelationship between the built environment and natural world. His work explores the conflict that exists at the intersection between the two spaces, when these industrial structures no longer fulfil their prescribed function and become obsolete. ‘Other Ground’ at the Lab Gallery is the first large scale solo show in Dublin by the Cork-based artist. The exhibition features over 20 paintings, several of which are large scale oil paintings, and the culmination of several years of work. Their deliberately ambiguous titles, such as ‘Other Ground,' ‘Distant Lines,' ‘Trace Elements,' ‘Speculative Artefact,' ‘Monolith’ and ‘Earthbound’ are elemental but suggestive of transitional spaces. In his painting, ‘Monolith,' a large concrete chimney bisects the painting like an ancient obelisk and its title alludes to the powerful influential force of the structure in the landscape.

Ungerer describes himself as taking a circuitous route to becoming an artist but it is clear that from early on, he had a deep-rooted conviction that ultimately, painting was his métier. He grew up in West Cork and in his late teens, spent three years in Strasbourg, the birthplace of his father, the celebrated writer and artist, Tomi Ungerer (1931-2019). In his early 20s, he moved to London where he studied photography and he subsequently worked as a freelance photographer for a number of years. In 2012, he returned to Cork to embark on a degree in Fine Art in the Crawford College of Art. This was followed by a scholarship-funded Masters on the prestigious Masters of Fine Art programme at Goldsmiths University London which he completed in 2018. He describes his time at Goldsmith’s as rigorous and intense, with students expected to robustly articulate and critically defend their ideas and work. Whilst most of Ungerer’s work at both the Crawford and Goldsmiths was in lens-based media, in recent years he gradually returned to painting in oils.

During his time at Goldsmiths in London, Ungerer saw memorable exhibitions by Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy and William Kentridge at Whitechapel. He also cites the work of the British artist, George Shaw, as a big influence on his work and a different way of looking at contemporary landscape. Shaw is known for his works with suburban subject-matter, in particular the housing estate in Coventry where he grew up. He eschews the inclusion of human presence in his art and this is something that resonates with Ungerer. Ungerer reads extensively and two books in particular have informed and inspired this latest body of paintings. These are Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside (1973) and Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness (2011) by the poets, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts. During the early 1970s, Mabey set about mapping his unofficial countryside, those richly mysterious, liminal spaces such as crumbling city docklands, inner city car parks, gravel pits, canal banks and rubbish tips. The infrastructure that remains in these areas, where wildlife and shrubs take over, offers an alternative and more subversive view of what we view as nature and where we encounter it. In a similar vein, in the publication Edgelands, the poets Farley and Symmons Roberts look up close at the urban fringes and describe how nature is intertwined with society’s detritus such as pylons, waste tips, car crushers, landfill sites in these strange no-man’s lands on the edge of cities. Both publications subvert one’s ideas about the countryside and where one encounter’s nature. They also raise the question as to what do we do with these edgelands — when they no longer have a function? Should they be preserved, observed or razed to the ground?

The obliteration and subversion of nature through industrialisation has led to much more environmentally conscious contemporary art in recent decades. Ungerer takes a more subtle and nuanced approach in that his preference is to have a sense of plurality in his work. He adopts a more generalised thematic manner and whilst climate change and industrial pollution are not foregrounded or overt in his work, human intervention on nature is a strong element. His overarching interest remains in the ‘spatial cultures’ of these peripheral landscapes. To this end, he paints fictional landscapes that amalgamate different places and ideas into what he describes as ‘a metaphorical space to reflect upon wider socio-geographic issues such as post-industrialisation, ecological degradation and the Anthropocene.’

Ungerer’s paintings are an eloquent evocation of the sense of silence and isolation within these strange, peripheral landscapes. Telecommunications structures, pipes, solar panels and satellite dishes take on an otherworldly, mysterious aspect in their hidden locations. Their structured, sculptural quality contrasts beautifully with the softness of the depiction of the landscapes in which they stand. Ungerer’s paintings are always devoid of any human presence although the aftermath of human intervention is evident. The artist is emphatic about that deliberate absence as it is the emptiness of the landscapes that engages him. Although it may seem contradictory, his paintings are at once both elegiac and dystopian. In fact, they call to mind Margaret Atwood’s ‘ustopias,' ‘these not-exactly places, which are anywhere but nowhere, and which are both mappable locations and states of mind.’

The artist’s earlier work in lens-based media and photography remains a strong aspect of his practice. He has a large archive of his own photographs, taken over the past twenty years of different locations he has travelled to, both remote and local. They are often the starting point for a painting or a series of paintings. Aside from informing his work at a research level, they assist with how he constructs the composition of a painting, which he spends a long time thinking about and his preference is often for a square format. Significantly, however, the colours he utilises never stay true to the original photograph. ‘Other Ground’ takes as its reference a photograph that Ungerer took in the UK when he was at Goldsmiths. He sees this decommissioned industrial building as representative of the decline of heavy industry in the Thatcher era with its attendant social problems but also symbolic of an uncertain future.

‘Skeletal Remains’ is based on a photograph from 2010 of the concrete skeleton of Anglo Irish Bank’s proposed new headquarters in Dublin’s docklands. Its incomplete status encapsulated the abrupt end of the Celtic Tiger years and remaining unfinished and neglected for several years, it became a totemic, emblematic structure that evokes this painful time. Ungerer removes it from its context on the quays and presents it to the viewer in an otherworldly context with the softly painted vegetative forms in the foreground.

Further afield, ‘Distant Lines’ is based on photographs that the artist took in the vast Atacama Desert in Chile in early 2020. Commonly known as the driest place in the world, and home to Chile’s lithium mines, Ungerer describes it as an amazing ethereal almost lunar landscape. The poetic austerity of the landscape and the strangeness of the environment is aptly described by the artist as like a cross between a western film and a film by Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian filmmaker, in particular his existential masterpiece, Stalker (1979) which Ungerer cites as an influence. In ‘Distant Lines’ the delicate rendering of the ladder and pylons creates a sense of fragility. The ladder is a leitmotif in the artist’s work and appears in ‘Trace Elements’ and ‘Monolith’ too.

In ‘Distant Lines’, the chaos of the stones in the foreground, an invention by the artist, demonstrates the virtuosity of Ungerer’s painting and there is a wonderful sense of tactility in the almost velveteen quality of their depiction. This makes an exquisite contrast between the conflicting spaces and environments of what the artist calls ‘the regimental geometry of the manmade’ and ‘the anarchic circularity of nature’. Similarly, the foregrounds of ‘Silent Plain’ and ‘Trace Elements’ have a beautifully rendered softness in their layered maroon surface that calls to mind the work of Mark Rothko. Ungerer’s technique is laborious and painstaking, and it is not surprising that a single painting can take up to a month to complete.

The painting, ‘Speculative artefact,' takes its inspiration from a photograph of a place Ungerer came across while travelling in Sardinia a decade ago. A brick structure, presumably left by the decline of industry, dominates the work and appealed to Ungerer almost as an artefact. Referring to these kind of redundant structures, he notes ‘They are manmade but they have their own autonomy in terms of their own degradation and I mean that because they don’t exist as how they were intended. It is organic decay which renders them visually autonomous in a way.’ The use of vivid pink and red hues in this and other works, subverts the realism of conventional photography and calls to mind a type of infrared film called Aerochrome, developed during the Cold War by Kodak. Using Photoshop, Ungerer changes the saturation levels until he has planned a kind of ethereal colour scheme to create this evocation and accentuation of the strange and unusual environments. The delicacy of the trees on the left hand side contrasts with the squat solidity of the brick structure.

‘Temporal Meridian’ is a recent work from 2024 and was inspired by photographs of the R&H grain store on Cork’s South Docks. These two giant towers were constructed in 1934 and 1954 and were prominent in the city until 2024, when they were demolished. Ungerer could see the buildings from his studio and observed their demolition while painting this work. The title references the temporality of man-made structures in that they are there for a certain period of time and in this case symbolise part of Cork’s industrial heritage. The use of the word meridian references the fact that the buildings were a prominent line within the skyline of Cork, a point where one could situate oneself. Collectively, this is a compelling body of work — immersive, thought-provoking and enigmatic.

Margarita Cappock