A PURPLE factory with two chimneys and fluorescent green windows, an abandoned border tower in a barren landscape or a bright blue pipeline leading nowhere… these are just three of the striking scenes you will find in Pascal Ungerer’s work.

And he happily admits his paintings are miles away from traditional landscapes.

‘When people think of landscape painting they often think of this beautiful, rural idyll. But to me that’s not what the real landscape is,’ he said over a cup of coffee at Skibbereen’s Riverside Café. 

‘That’s not the modern, contemporary landscape where you see old buildings or old farms and phone poles, which are all part of our everyday landscape.’ 

Marginal, abandoned buildings and infrastructure have long been a fascination for the Cork-based artist. 

Growing up near Three Castle Head on the Mizen Peninsula, it felt like being at the edge of the island, at the edge of Europe even, he said.

Pascal worked as a press photographer for many years before dedicating more of his time to creating the large-scale oil paintings he is so well-known for.

The empty ghost estates he came across during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger years were an early inspiration.

While driving across the country for work assignments, he would stop to take pictures of homes with no people in them, half-finished and abandoned. 

‘It was almost like a post-apocalyptic, dystopian landscape, which has since been really fetishized through video games and TV.

At the time I went out of my way to find those half-rural, half-urban places.’

Now in his late 40s, he was something of a late bloomer when it comes to art, completing a degree in Fine Art at Crawford and Goldsmith College in London in his 30s.

He has since been part of many residency programmes, including at Backwater in Cork and Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen.

Monolith

‘I ended up doing three residencies at Uillinn before I did a show there. It was at a time when I didn’t have a studio. I was in Cork city and commuting every day, so I spent a lot of time on the road. It was a time where I was able to develop the style of painting that I’m doing now.’

These days his main workplace is a studio at home in Cork city where he works every day.

Photography still plays a central role in his process, which is very structured and planned out.

His paintings are often based on two or three photos of places that are pre-arranged in a collage.

From that sketch the painting will come to life on the canvas.

His current colour scheme sits between blue and green. It’s a combination of turquoise, emerald green, and some yellow, he says, almost the colour of copper as it turns blue.

The versatile artist tended to stick with one colour scheme for a year or two, but this is changing as is his development as a painter.

‘I developed my own techniques and taught myself how to paint. It was quite influenced by the photography I did and you can see that in a lot of the work,’ he says. ‘There’s an almost photographic element to it as well. My work is quite technical. I use a ruler a lot to draw things out. It’s not freeform.’

Silent Plain

Pascal went to primary school in Goleen and grew up in a creative household. His father was Tomi Ungerer, the prolific graphic designer and illustrator who was best-known as an author of children’s books. He recalls how his father used to make hats and party decorations when a birthday was coming up. Growing up, he had no idea his dad was an artist. 

‘We just thought he was a farmer, we were small kids you know.We were protected from that in a way. My brother mostly runs the farm in West Cork now and sometimes I go back. Funnily enough my dad’s studio is still there. We haven’t changed that at all and it’s exactly as it was. It’s like a time capsule.’

He remembers his father often working from seven in the morning until late at night. Tomi Ungerer’s mind was always engaged and his way of relaxing was doing the New York Times cryptic crossword.

As a teenager in the 1990s, Pascal lived for a while in his dad’s native city of Strasbourg in France and got a taste for electronic music there. 

‘I was really into techno and electronica. For me it’s also the sound of the periphery. There used to be these places in the middle of nowhere, or big warehouses where you could go to a rave back then and that was also a place on the edge.’

Earlier this year, he travelled to India to be part of an exhibition of miniature paintings at Jaipur Art Week, and in May he will be in Berlin for an artist-in-residence programme at SomoS Arts. 

As for the meaning of his work, the visual artist says he prefers to leave that up to the people who see it. 

‘I firmly believe that good art will always have a question mark behind it. Not to the extent where you know absolutely zero what it’s about. When you go beyond that I really don’t see the point anymore.’

When he’s not creating art that deals with half-rural, half-urban spaces, Pascal is pounding the pavements.

He got into running over the past six years and took part in the Skibbereen half marathon last year.

You might spot him taking part again this year.