Artist of the Month: JOAN FONTCUBERTA
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Artist of the Month: Joan Fontcuberta
What Darwin overlooked
With the ironic precision of a scientist and the imagination of a fabulist, Joan Fontcuberta turns the tools of truth against themselves. For decades, the Catalan artist ( born 1955 in Barcelona ) has been one of photography's most brilliant skeptics—a chronicler of visual illusions, a philosopher of the image, and, perhaps most intriguingly, a rogue in the laboratory of reality.
In his latest series , What Darwin Missed , Fontcuberta collaborates with artificial intelligence to create an entire ecosystem of fictional corals—organisms that exist only in the space between belief and vision. At first glance, the works evoke the aesthetics of scientific photography: meticulously lit specimens, Latin nomenclature, and the sober precision of natural history. But beneath their polished surface lies a philosophical provocation. Each coral, from Madrepora regia to Testa abyssalis , is a paradox—an image that looks like evidence but breathes like poetry.
The project originated in the archives of the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation in Berlin, where Fontcuberta rediscovered an unfinished research paper from 1938. Ehrhardt, both a photographer and a biologist, had documented coral structures for the Hamburg Natural History Museum—a project interrupted by the outbreak of war. Fontcuberta resurrects this historical fragment not as a reconstruction, but as a reinterpretation: an AI-generated continuation of a scientific dream derailed by history.
The result is a visual taxonomy of invented life forms. Each Cryptocnidaria —Fontcuberta's own genus of speculative corals—reveals radical adaptations, impossible symmetries, and evolutionary leaps that would make Darwin blush. These corals challenge the notion of slow, linear evolution; instead, they design a world where environmental stress, radiation, or even data itself can accelerate transformation.
Stylistically, the series oscillates between New Objectivity and Surrealism, between Ernst Haeckel and Hieronymus Bosch. Fontcuberta uses humor as a scalpel and skepticism as a microscope. While his creatures are astonishingly lifelike, they are generated by algorithms – an ecosystem of pixels that reflects our collective desire to see and believe.
And yet, behind the irony lies something profoundly tender: the realization that images, however artificial they may be, are the way we understand existence. In "What Darwin Missed," Fontcuberta doesn't simply create new species—he revives wonder itself.
The works, presented as large-format giclée prints on Hahnemühle Museum Fine Art paper , are available in a limited edition of five (60 × 50 cm and 50 × 40 cm, 2024). Each print invites viewers and collectors alike into a strange new ocean – one that does not exist in nature, but in the imagination of the machine and in the mind of an artist who never ceases to ask: What if?
Fontcuberta's world is a world where photography stops documenting and starts dreaming.
And perhaps that is exactly what Darwin overlooked.