JOAN FONTCUBERTA - Calcigorgia spiculifera

Paper: Giclée prints on Hahnemühle Museum Fine Art paper
Size: 50 x 40 cm
Edition: 5
Year: 2024
Certificate: Signed and numbered by the artist.

JOAN FONTCUBERTA – Calcigorgia spiculifera

In Calcigorgia spiculifera, Fontcuberta imagines coral as architecture – a lush cathedral of intricate logic. The structure seems almost plausible: its stems rise with mathematical discipline, its tips bloom in pastel light, every detail radiates the authority of natural history. And yet, the illusion is too perfect. Something in its symmetry betrays its artificial origin – a coral created by the imagination.

The name Calcigorgia spiculifera could easily have come from a marine biology handbook, and that's precisely the point. Fontcuberta borrows the syntax of science to construct fiction, parodying taxonomy as a poetic language of control. The supposed species name spiculifera ("spiked") suggests microscopic precision—a kind of pseudo-credibility that only reinforces the deception.

This coral doesn't grow—it calculates . Its tendrils, generated once by AI and again by irony, seem to weave data and biology into a seamless illusion. It's as if nature itself had signed up for design software.

With Calcigorgia spiculifera, Fontcuberta continues his lifelong game: to expose photography as a theater of faith. What begins as a documentary miracle ends as a philosophical comedy – a digital echo of Alfred Ehrhardt's rational modernism, now revived as a synthetic myth.