JOAN FONTCUBERTA - Cladopsammia gracilis

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 – Cladopsammia gracilis

Among Fontcuberta's fictional life forms, Cladopsammia gracilis seems like a specimen that has escaped from a dream laboratory. At first glance, it resembles a real coral colony – delicate, disciplined and strangely dignified – but there is something eerily precise about it, as if evolution had suddenly developed a sense of design.

The name itself, a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the real Cladopsammia, carries Fontcuberta's characteristic irony: gracilis (‘slender,’ ‘graceful’) describes not only the form, but also the deception. The coral's intricate tubes and honeycomb structures seem to have grown under a microscope rather than in the sea, every detail whispering algorithmic intent rather than biological chance.

The monochrome image mimics the austere aesthetics of early scientific photography – a visual language of authority that Fontcuberta delightedly subverts. It is as if the coral feigns seriousness while secretly laughing. The absence of colour reinforces the illusion and makes the fictional all the more credible.

Here, AI serves not as an instrument of invention, but of revelation: it shows how belief in images persists even when reality has left the frame. Cladopsammia gracilis thus becomes a meditation on photography's complicity in the construction of ‘truth’ – a coral fossil of our visual credulity.