JOAN FONTCUBERTA - Testa abyssalis

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 – Testa abyssalis

In Testa abyssalis, Fontcuberta brings his fiction to the heart of life – where form merges with feeling. What at first glance appears to be a fossilised fragment of coral turns out, on closer inspection, to be the heart of the deep – an organ beating in the ocean of the imaginary.

The pulsating structure, half flesh, half stone, seems to remain in a state between decay and birth. The bright red waves are reminiscent of muscle tissue, the grey layers of sediments of memory. This heart is not anatomical, but mythical: it pumps meaning rather than blood.

Fontcuberta plays with the language of science here to reveal something deeply poetic. The title, seemingly strict Latin, betrays the double meaning of its deception – testa as shell, skull or heart, abyssalis as that which lies beyond the comprehensible.

Thus, the work becomes an emblem of his entire series What Darwin Missed: a heart of stone, created from data, a symbol of the longing to find something human again in artificial intelligence. Perhaps this heart does not beat underwater, but within us – where doubt and wonder meet.