JOAN FONTCUBERTA - Macrodendronephthya darwinii

Paper: Giclée prints on Hahnemühle Museum Fine Art paper
Size: 50 x 60 cm
Edition: 5
Year: 2024
Certificate: Signed and numbered by the artist.

JOAN FONTCUBERTA – Macrodendronephthya darwinii

With Macrodendronephthya darwinii, Fontcuberta leaves behind the gentle poetry of coral reefs and ventures into the disturbing terrain of mutation and catastrophe. The image is reminiscent of the majestic yet terrifying shape of an atomic mushroom cloud – nature imitating destruction, or perhaps destruction imitating nature.

The title deepens the irony: Macrodendronephthya – “large tree-like coral” – suggests growth, expansion, unfolding life. The epithet darwinii dedicates this monstrous beauty to Charles Darwin himself, as if evolution had taken a radioactive shortcut. What if adaptation were not gradual but explosive?

In eerie isolation against a neutral background, this coral seems less like a living organism than the fossil of an event – a petrified memory of an impact. Its folds, reminiscent of both flowers and fungi, oscillate between bloom and explosion, sculpture and scar. Fontcuberta's manipulation blurs these contrasts until they merge into a single visual paradox: creation as destruction.

Here, the artist uses AI not to create a fantasy, but to reveal our fear of the next transformation of nature – a transformation triggered not by time, but by technology. Macrodendronephthya darwinii is a coral for the Anthropocene, a radioactive relic of the species that invented its own extinction and called it progress.