The first thing you notice when you come into Marlo Pascual’s little room at the Swiss Institute is a chicken that won’t come out of its coup. Pascual has built a ramp that comes down an exaggeratedly long distance from the fowl’s portrait, which then crosses the room and runs right up the wall. As if a chicken that had taken it upon itself to materialize out of a photograph would have no trouble breaking the relatively minor law of gravity. It’s a funny scene.

The art-finding artist must eventually settle with their nostalgia, and that seems to be what Pascual is about in this piece. After the chicken, the eye is drawn to an arrestingly familiar portrait of a woman circa 1956, a synthetic bob atop some flattened genuine hair, sepia eyes looking pretty but suspicious. She looks as if she’s angling for some bit part in a new wave film. Below her is a black canvass, a direct (but not gratuitous) comment on the inevitable fate of whatever it is that unnerves those eyes of hers. Next to both is a lamp, modernist and dim, recalling the same period as the lady’s haircut. One is already feeling those nostalgic pangs, in my case absurdly, for an era I know only through film.

The real click, though, is when we are asked to transfer this narrative spunk across the room to an entirely different array. In much the same cluster we see a photo of a cactus surrounded by a few real cacti. The still life uses the same tones as did the portrait of the lady. The cactus, you think vaguely, has a roughly human life span. These look like they could be Sinatra’s cacti, or Calvino’s. The sentimental pangs are still ringing away. For what? Cacti? Aunt Faye? Big ol’ death?

What I think Pascual is crooning about here is the omnivorousness of the nostalgic temperament. Subject is no real matter when we are signifying these photos. A novel about a cactus is unlikely to be as as absorbing as that of the callback that wasn’t for some forgotten matriarch. But pictures are a horse of a different color. In the nostalgic haze of the found photograph all narratives are equal, because the same narrative force animates both; yours.

For Immediate Release Runs at the Swiss Institute / Contemporary art from January 14th until February 14th alongside Pierre Vadi’s Delta.