JOAN FONTCUBERTA - Stylophora imperatoris

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 – Stylophora imperatoris

In Stylophora imperatoris, Fontcuberta lends a majestic touch to scientific authority. The title – ‘the emperor's Stylophora’ – suggests a discovery that belongs in an imperial cabinet of curiosities, a relic of a lost expedition where taxonomy met delusion. The coral itself, depicted in immaculate black and white, appears both fossilised and futuristic, like an object excavated from the depths of the imagination.

The structure is typical Fontcuberta: a paradox of precision. The surface, littered with countless microcells, appears to have been scanned under a microscope, each pore a tiny declaration of authenticity. And yet the form—compact, symmetrical, strangely anthropomorphic—betrays its fictionality. It could be coral, bone, or artefact. The boundaries blur as easily as the truth it seems to pretend to be.

Fontcuberta crowns the illusion with the name imperatoris. Here, the emperor is not a person, but an idea – the sovereign myth of scientific authority. His ‘specimen’ is an AI-created impostor, a new species of coral invented to flatter the empire of knowledge.

Stylophora imperatoris thus becomes a small but effective act of resistance: a reminder that classification itself is a political gesture and that beauty often hides its rebellion under the guise of order. Fontcuberta's coral reigns supreme – not over the sea, but over our desire to believe.