Francesca Piqueras - Photographs
Exhibition from 29 September to 28 October 2023
FRANCESCA PIQUERAS
For a decade, Francesca Piqueras has been photographing strange technological fossils washed up on the shores of the world's oceans and seas. With us, she has entered the Anthropocene. An era shaped by man, an era in the geological sense in which the traces of industrial activity in perpetual renewal can be read with the naked eye, right on the surface of the globe, without the need to explore the strata of a vanished age. No archaeologist will look at these carcasses: they belong to a present that transforms, engulfs and regurgitates the obscure tools of an age of iron and concrete all at once. His sensitive vision continues to question, without judging, this incessant conflict between construction and decay, creation and collapse, where nature and humanity clash in a battle without a winner.
Francesca Piqueras knows how to capture the subtle interplay between balance and imbalance, order and entropy. Her framing brings to life and creates tension between antagonistic flows that ignore and fight each other, coexist, and respond to each other: on the one hand, the prodigious inventiveness of man, on the other, the irrepressible power of nature. By creating an objective and emotional dimension, she defines a space that is timeless but deeply rooted in our own time, foreshadowing the acceleration towards the chaos of our origins, in an unchanging cycle. A vision that literally takes on a metaphysical meaning, bordering on prophecy. If matter disintegrates and dilutes, if it bears the traces of humanity's ephemeral passage, it is to better accentuate its possible metamorphosis, in a re-creation independent of both the laws of nature and the hand of man.
His photographs mark the emergence of an arbitrary architecture, with no apparent purpose or direct meaning, that comes alive with a life of its own, abstract, and anachronistic forms reinvented by the fantasy of the elements. In this spontaneous geometry, the elements, whether fluid or solid, delimit a universe that is both dreamlike and real, indifferent to our existence. The resulting structures belong to a creative process outside our understanding of the order of the world, whether natural or human.
Francesca Piqueras has chosen to explore this parallel existence. This extremely acute observation invites us to re-read our era, highlighting the contraction of time itself, which races and clashes within the same mechanism, squeezing the past and compressing the future. A time of progress that crushes and juggles fire, rock, water, and people alike. Between the raw scars of a brutal transmutation and the fragility of our human condition, Francesca Piqueras's improbable monuments reign silently over an absurd stage, powerfully expressing the unusual, timeless yet fundamentally inventive aesthetic of contemporary archaeology.
Each of her photographs vibrates with a muted, gentle energy, where the turbulence of man and the elements collide and respond to each other. But the symbolic violence of these conquering architectures contrasts with the subtle, ever-changing, almost rebellious light. This very particular reading of the ambiguous relationship between humans and landscapes or seascapes gives this dreamlike narrative a delicate balance between abstraction and figuration, where time is never frozen but only suspended, still undecided about what the future holds.
BIOGRAPHY
Francesca Piqueras is a French artist of Italian-Peruvian origin, born in Milan (Italy) to artist parents who were friends of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Salvador Dali. She began photographing at the age of thirteen, studied Art History and Cinema in Paris and began a career as an editor on several feature films. From 2007 to 2010, she exhibited her first black-and-white series, before switching to colour in 2011. Influenced by Michelangelo Antonioni's 'Deserto Rosso', she has asserted her atypical vision of contemporary industrial archaeology in a series of annual exhibitions, winning over a broad public, collectors and the press. From Scotland to Peru, via Italy, she pursues her artistic project between sea, sky, metal and rust: military architecture, oil platforms and marble quarries are all scars that bear silent witness to the presence of humanity and its impact on the landscape.
"I photograph what man builds for economic or warlike reasons. To meet their needs, people build incredible architectures in extreme situations and in ways that can be questionable. But my aim is not to denounce. On the contrary, I'm interested in man's folly, his paradoxes and contradictions. It seems to me that the aesthetic peak of these objects is when nature reclaims its rights. Time, rust and decay reinvent these architectures as sculptures and poetically rewrite the history of man. Our history."
Francesca Piqueras