The 'Monsters' of Joan Fontcuberta

Joan Fontcuberta (1955) is a teacher, essayist and historian, he has stood out as an artist in the field of photography and is the only Spanish photographer awarded the Hasselblad International Award (2013). It is in this discipline that he has reflected like no other to date on the format, content, purpose and finitude of photography and the image.

Monstres is the artist's first major exhibition in Barcelona since 2008. In this exhibition we find Fontcuberta's 6 most recent projects, all of them poetic and disruptive. The photographs start as real documents that move towards speculation, natural images, everyday in some cases, that become naturally or artificially fake, altered or deformed. The artist refers to the chiaroscuros of the soul, he shows us what makes us human and what makes us reject barbarism in contrast to the chaos in which we live and the conflict, the crisis, which by definition, is the moment when the new has not yet established itself and the old has not yet left.

Fontcuberta diverts images from their main function and loads them with another energy. The result of this process ends up causing fear. These are archive images and damaged family photos, incomplete memories, facts extracted from context, anonymous faces, faces of which only a trace remains. Beauty becomes deformity due to the passage of time or the hand of the artist, who works with algorithms and other forms of image processing that result in an omen, a future similar to nightmares, and establish a critical perspective with language, a true conflict between nature and technology, between photography and memory.

In the author's words: "If the Goyaesque precept established that the sleep of reason produces monsters, we must assume the duty to reverse it and make the sleep of monsters produce reason. In short, I try to tame monsters"

In the exhibition, organized by the Fundació Vila Casas and which can be visited until January 23, 2022, at the Museu Can Framis, we will find:

Botswana Safari (2015):

Montage on the photograph of King Emeritus Juan Carlos de Borbón, posing before the dead elephant and an appearance of El Pequeño Nicolás, in a clear allegory to corruption.

Fahrenheit 451 (2019 – 2021):

It refers to the symbolic act of burning 451 copies of Bradbury's novel. With a hopeful ending, the artist uses the burning of books by the Nazis in 1933 and the figure of the pyromaniac firefighter, establishing an ideological bridge between the two eras.

Trauma I (2019 – 2021):

Photography suffers the passage of time. In the author's words: << It loses its link with reality and becomes amnesic, it's as if it suffered from Alzheimer's >>.

Trauma II – Propagnosia (2021), (2017 – 2020):

What remains of the portrait of the public figure when the silver halide oxidizes until it disfigures the physiognomy and turns the face into a monstrous specter? The photograph becomes a ghost.

Gastropoda (2012- 2015):

A handful of snails devours invitations to exhibitions and reproductions of works of art on paper. The degradation, digestion and metamorphosis of the image.

Frenografías (2021):

Unpublished project carried out with Pilar Rosado based on the archive of Dr. Joan Obiols, it is based on photographs taken of psychiatric patients, treated with a system of algorithms where faces are deformed, recovering the Baconian portrait: an artifice that approaches the truth much better than reality itself.

Beautiful Agony (2020 – 2021):

Jointly with Pilar Rosado and using DeepFake technology, we found a series of faces of politicians and well-known figures having an orgasm while listening to a political speech. This aims to criticize the sexual scandals perpetrated by public figures.