Francesca Piqueras, who is known for her photographs of shipwrecks abandoned to rust, presents at the Galerie de l’Europe a new and very different series, which nonetheless is in the continuity of her work. It is a similar same theme, a similar obsession deepened here by the artist with a singular approach, fascinated by the relationship that man has with nature. But it is towards the continent that she turned her lens this time, on two fundamental elements which are stone and water.
After bending to the bedside of human constructions abandoned on the coasts the world over, she leans with “Movimento” on the injured mountains of the region of Carrara (Italy), amputated since the Etruscans to get to the marble, and the imprisoned and constrained waters of the Yellow River in China, which are encircled with concrete to better take the energy and draw electricity. Not only does Francesca Piqueras show us, in separate clichés, the wounds of the rock and the gushing of the waters suddenly released during phenomenal triennial “let go”, but she also confronts them in diptychs that form like the two faces of the same martyr: on one side the open wound and, on the other, the blood that gushes forth.
If the photographer confronts us here more frontally than in her previous series with the stigmata of the industrial civilization, if her images make more palpable the ecological hecatomb in progress, they invite us, as always, to look beyond the traces ‘she shows us. Because these blocks of stone torned from the mountains, these rivers whose course is deflected, all this fits for her in a process of construction – destruction that is played out on a cosmic scale and that she calls the ” Movimento “. A state of perpetual impermanence, of which the artist seeks to grasp the aesthetic and tragic power.
Francesca Piqueras “Movimento”
From February 18 to March 31, 2019
Gallery of Europe
55 rue de Seine, 75006 Paris
From Tue. to Sat. 11h – 19h30
Sun & Mon 12h – 19h30 (in the presence of the artist)
+33 1 55 42 94 23 / [email protected]
