St Pancras in exaggeration while Calling
50 x 40 cm | 20 x 16 in
2024
This work stages Saint Pancras, traditionally a figure of protection, health, and youthful virtue, as an unstable protagonist caught within a theatre of collapse, summoned to preside over an end he did not author. Positioned as witness rather than agent, he inhabits a tension between divine authority and total impotence, with his royal adornment signaling an expectation of control that is immediately undermined by confusion and inaction. Around him, a fractured cosmology unfolds in which other deities remain inaccessible or equally uncertain, producing a condition where power circulates without function. Absurdity emerges here as structural rather than incidental, with his laughter registering the dissonance between inherited systems of belief and a reality shaped by human-driven catastrophe. The apocalypse, no longer divinely ordained, reveals itself as self-authored, rendering symbolic authority obsolete. The inclusion of the toilet as a companion object collapses the sacred into the abject, introducing a bodily temporality that mirrors an accelerated descent toward collapse; within this convergence, figures of care and order are reduced to spectators of an irreversible process.
The base for this piece is the Christian saint St. Pancras, patron of children, occupations and health, but he also invokes supreme rule through his courage, faith and perseverance in the face of persecution. He was summoned to initiate the end of existence of man, a day of annihilation. Still baffled, He changed to the uniform fit for a King, adorned with gold and jewels, as his itinerary suggested. Unsure of what to do after, He tried to reach out to the other deities of the unreachable and imaginary realms, but they are also as confused - they are also summoned to assist Him. The only thing He can do is to laugh at the absurdity of the situation - because the event of the end of existence is actually caused by the humans themselves. What absolute power can the Saint even execute when He has not been participating at all? Our race to doomsday is even making the deceased and the fictional turn on their heels. As much as he wants to ensure overall health, that will be impossible at this situation. The toilet is a metaphor of human's speedrun to apocalypse, and become a companion of St. Pancras while he changed.
