JOAN FONTCUBERTA - Corallium cancrorum

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

JOAN FONTCUBERTA – Corallium cancrorum

With Corallium cancrorum, Fontcuberta takes the concept of hybridization to its extreme. What begins as a coral formation quickly transforms into something disturbingly alive—half crustacean, half sculpture, half joke (Fontcuberta has never shied away from exaggeration). Its branching body rises from the seabed like an organism unsure of its own taxonomy, equal parts coral reef and living being.

The invented name Corallium cancrorum plays on this ambiguity: "Crab coral." The Latin suffix -crorum lends a feigned authority to an impossibility—a crawling coral. In Fontcuberta's speculative ecology, nature no longer evolves through adaptation, but through imagination, guided not by biology, but by irony.

At first glance, the work could pass for meticulous underwater photography. The lighting, the particulate haze, the believable ocean depth – all perfectly calibrated to deceive. But then the legs appear: grotesque, plausible, hilarious. The illusion collapses and reveals itself as an artistic device, but by this point, the viewer is already complicit in the fiction.

Corallium cancrorum embodies Fontcuberta's larger project: to expose our hunger for visual credibility. It is a coral that never existed, yet we almost wish it had – an evolutionary trick orchestrated by artist and algorithm.