JOAN FONTCUBERTA - Nemanthus rubescens

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 – Nemanthus rubescens

In Nemanthus rubescens, Fontcuberta presents one of his most seductive illusions—a coral landscape so iridescent that the mind surrenders to it before suspecting any trickery. The scene radiates an impossible delicacy: delicate branches unfold like illuminated neurons, emitting an almost celestial bioluminescence. It looks real enough to touch, yet too perfect to be believable.

The invented name Nemanthus rubescens is borrowed from the lexicon of marine taxonomy: Nemanthus (from an actual genus of sea anemones) and rubescens (“to blush” or “to turn red”). The blushing is the key—Fontcuberta’s quiet joke about photographic seduction itself. This coral doesn’t just imitate life; it embodies beauty.

Immersed in a palette of vibrant reds and icy blues, the image conveys both the rigor of scientific documentation and the drama of romantic painting. Here, AI becomes Fontcuberta's accomplice, constructing a scene so harmonious it borders on the absurd. Nature, filtered through code, appears as a fantasy of its own perfection.

Nemanthus rubescens serves as a microcosm for Fontcuberta's artistic philosophy: to show how easily truth can disguise itself as elegance and how beauty can become the most convincing form of fiction. This coral doesn't grow—it dreams itself into being.