Francesca Piqueras’s series In Fine, on display at Galerie de l’Europe in Paris, shows shipwrecks trapped in ice around the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia. Cool colors, grey tones, and playful forms accompany her reflection on abandonment.
At first, Francesca Piqueras’s work awakens one’s curiosity. Her books take readers onto prolonged, multi-stage journeys that unfold page after page. One’s eye wanders, reluctant to accept these places as real. That’s what photography does: its frontal view challenges our image of the world. A recomposed landscape scrolls as we turn pages, from a bunker on the Atlantic coast to an oil rig frozen in the solitude of the North Sea; from the foggy shores of Bangladesh to the Peruvian coast, to the D-Day beaches. As these images scroll by, they come together to form a concrete landscape of industrial waste.
Here, the images of dereliction couldn’t be any more remote or any more extreme. Petropavlovsk, the capital of Perm Krai named after Peter and Paul, is graced with some Brezhnev-era architecture. The bare concrete is paired with snow cover 182 days a year. Men are fishing within sight of red-and-white smokestacks. In Piqueras’s work, people are insignificant. They are mostly absent, having abandoned their ships, scuttled their engines, and taken off to the open sea.
We often say with mischief that we’ve seen way too much ruin: the majestic decay of Detroit by Camillo Vergara; Hiroshi Sugimoto’s long exposure shots of movie theaters; surreptitious snapshots of urban explorers… Some have turned ruin-hunting into a form of tourism. For others it is a source of twisted eroticism. And yet one keeps returning, at least to the ruins pictured by Francesca Piqueras. One is attracted more to the colors than by a sense of voyeurism. These ruins appear alive; the poor things are stiff with cold, gnawed by rust and time, and yet breathing. Water splashes against their hollowed-out shells that crack beneath the cold winter sun. The hulls dance amid the waves, heaving with the tides like floating islands.
Nature’s creation and recreation. Machines captive of brutal environments. Swallowed, and soon digested, these ships turn into mountains and barrier reefs. In these conditions, nature is capable of transforming anything. Awkward, perhaps too gluttonous, it spews and spits out these noxious morsels from the depths of its belly. There is a battle being waged for an uncertain survival. Who will win: nature or the polluted wreckage? No doubt, the color.
Arthur Dayras
Francesca Piqueras, In Fine
April 24 to June 9, 2018
Galerie de l’Europe
55 Rue de Seine
75006 Paris
France
