JOAN FONTCUBERTA - Pachyseris gigeriana

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 – Pachyseris gigeriana

With Pachyseris gigeriana, Fontcuberta plunges headlong into the surreal and cinematic. The name alone – a mischievous homage to both marine taxonomy and H.R. Giger's biomechanical universe – signals that this coral cannot be trusted. It belongs to no reef, no ocean, but to the fertile depths of the imagination, where biology meets nightmare and humour.

At first glance, the organism could pass for a textbook specimen of Pachyseris, the so-called ‘elephant skin coral’. On closer inspection, however, its ribs pulsate in an eerie symmetry, as if they had grown in the Petri dish of a dream. The folds seem too deliberate, too sensual, too architectural – a coral that has apparently studied modernist sculpture and decided to improve upon it.

Here, Fontcuberta transforms taxonomy into parody. Pachyseris gigeriana mimics the gravitas of scientific nomenclature while cleverly inserting cultural DNA. This is not evolution, but the art of citation – an aesthetic mutation brought about by memory, art history and the hallucinatory logic of the algorithm.

With the help of AI, Fontcuberta blurs the boundary between specimen and sculpture, nature and nightmare. The result is a coral that seems to be petrified in the imagination – a species that never lived, yet appears disturbingly alive.