Gothic Pastoral: Solar Flares and the Romantic Sublime
I.
Gothic Pastoral is a series of exhibitions that continues the inward path of Solo Show Online through the unsorted landscape. Since 2020, the series has invited artists to make ephemeral interventions in fields, forests, industrial ruins, and infrastructural margins. These are exhibitions in the post-offsite tradition; the landscape enters the work as poetic material and the image that circulates online is where the exhibition resides.
The pastoral tradition that was rooted in Hesiod's epic poem Works and Days and developed by the poems of Theocritus in the third century was carried into the eighteenth century through works like Virgil's Eclogues and Sidney's Arcadia. It imagines landscape as an orderly sunlit countryside where time moves gently. The shepherd is in his meadow; the relation between human and land is effortless and clear. "Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi" (Tityrus, you lie at ease beneath the shelter of a spreading beech); even the shadows here are pleasurable and darkness is simply night, it is the faithful rhythmic turning of the sky. The forest exists at the edge of the scene; the locus amoenus, the pleasant place, is serene because what lies outside the frame has been refused entry. What the tradition required in order to sustain that image was the suppression of the seasonal violence and the unknown at the forest's edge that the landscape actually contains.
The Gothic restores darkness to the landscape that the Pastoral had suppressed. Its emergence in the mid-eighteenth century is inseparable from the Enlightenment's opposing project: light is reason; reason applied to domains that were previously held together by mystery and inherited authority. The Enlightenment's method of empirical inquiry was applied without exemption: the ghost is just a psychological projection; the cathedral is just a building; darkness is occasioned by the absence of windows. The Church's explanatory imprimatur on suffering and death, much like the aristocracy's claim to power as divine dispensation, had cohered through obscurantism and tradition. When subjected to reason, each of these vested mysteries were disrobed as the deliberate manufacture of obscurity protecting specific interests. Their authority had always depended on remaining partially inexplicable and light was their undoing.
The cathedral and the castle exceed human proportion; they could not exceed time. Their deterorating architecture generated an atmosphere coined "gloomth": the melancholic delight of dwelling in spaces where the old order is visibly failing and the power still legible in stone is also visibly losing its claim to permanence. The Gothic's pleasure in the corrupt monk and the tyrannical lord is rooted in their revelation of horror and excess. Gothic darkness is still bounded within a Christian moral framework where sin has consequence and the supernatural answers to divine order, but it becomes aestheticized in a way that begins to detach it from that framework's authority. Dwelling in gloomth meant that darkness could be inhabited aesthetically.
Sturm und Drang, the German proto-Romantic movement of the 1760s-1780s, prized intensity of feeling over Enlightenment rationality; Goethe's Werther found in nature the mirror of his tumultuous emptions and Schiller's Die Räuber staged rebellion in forest hideouts. Sturm und Drang sought authentic emotion through rejection of artifice; Gothic Pastoral recognizes we've passed through too many layers of mediation to simply recover immediacy. The intensity remains because storm and stress has never needed pristine nature; it just needs any landscape where feeling can be recognized for what it is. Novalis knew this: 'nach Innen geht der geheimnißvolle Weg. In uns, oder nirgends ist die Ewigkeit mit ihren Welten, die Vergangenheit und Zukunft' (the mysterious path leads inwards. Within us, or nowhere, lies eternity with its worlds, the past and the future). When the hikiko(mori-kei) girl touches grass, her solitude is undisturbed: the solitary visionary doesn't leave the bedroom to escape mediation. Mediation is everywhere and everything is workable material in the service of poetry.
The outdoor interventions of Gothic Pastoral do not document the corruption of nature by technology but their originary inseparability. As damaged children we work with compromised materials and the heart refuses to stop even when it knows better: there is no pure nature behind us and no resolved future ahead. The screenglare's glow and the wasteland's shine carry the same phosphoresence; the room and the field are both sites where forms emerge from whatever substrate remains.
In full: Untitled Mysterious Shrine Maiden, DENPA (Autumn 2026)