JOAN FONTCUBERTA - Madrepora regia

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 – Madrepora regia

In Fontcuberta's speculative taxonomy, Madrepora regia reigns supreme as the sovereign coral – a baroque organism whose geometry appears both disciplined and delirious. The name recalls Madrepora, an 18th-century genus classification for stony corals, which is ironically elevated to royal status here (regia = ‘of the queen’).

This imaginary species embodies Fontcuberta's characteristic play with authority and illusion. Its form suggests an impossible hybrid: part biological specimen, part algorithmic hallucination. The delicate, branched filigree structures are reminiscent of both the precision of scientific illustrations and the exaggerations of digital artifice.

By reviving Alfred Ehrhardt's unfinished coral study from 1938, Madrepora regia becomes a visual echo of the museum piece that never existed – a ghost from the archive, regenerated by AI. It stages the absurd fantasy of evolution in fast forward: corals as monarchs, data as DNA.

Fontcuberta's humour resonates beneath the surface – in the pseudo-Latin nomenclature, in the pseudo-scientific reverence – reminding us that taxonomy itself is a cultural fiction. With Madrepora regia, the artist crowns deception as a creative act and invites us to reflect on the fragility of knowledge and the beauty of falsification.