Francesca Piqueras joins the Galerie Cyril Guernieri with the exhibition of her new series “De pierre et de sable” (“Of stone and sand”), from October 5 to November 11, and also presents her first sculptures, an extension of her photographic work.
With De pierre et de sable”, Francesca Piqueras continues her project on the fundamental elements (water, stone, fire) to which she has already devoted six series: Movimento (2018), Fire (2020), Marble (2021), Mar ( 2022). In this new opus, produced in Peru, the photographer explores the mineral universe of this country (desert, mountains) with the aesthetic high standards that characterize her, on the edge of abstraction.
The flamboyant multicolored stripes of the Vinicunca mountain seem to come from the paintings of Gerhard Richter’s Strip series. “These colored streaks bear witness to the scars left by an invisible hand,” explains Francesca Piqueras. Because it is the melting of ice due to global warming which has revealed the red of iron oxide, the yellow of sulphite, the purple-brown of goethite and limonite, the infinite shades of green of chlorite.
In Huacachina, in the south of Peru, Francesca Piqueras captured the metamorphoses of the desert as the sun moves. She draws the sinuosity of the dunes, the paradoxical sensuality of these virgin spaces which evoke just as much the softness of naked bodies as the Martian landscapes or Frank Herbert’s Dune.
Her mountain and desert photographs are sometimes combined in diptychs: “Creating a new image from two landscapes allows me to go a little further in abstraction,” explains Francesca Piqueras. It is also a way, through the play of lines and shapes which continue and complement each other, to express the idea of continuity in metamorphosis.”
A witness to her time, Francesca Piqueras has been exhibiting since 2007, initially with black and white series centered on the urban universe. She switched to color in 2009 and affirmed a metaphysical vision of contemporary industrial archaeology. She thus developed eight series on abandoned marine architecture, before beginning her project on the fundamental elements.
In 2016 she was the guest of the Beijing Photographic Fortnight.
In 2017, a retrospective was dedicated to her at the Palazzo Ducale in Massa (Italy).
In 2021 she was nominated for the Pictet Prize for her series “Feu”.
From September 2021 to December 2022, she represented France during the first Photomenta at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, which exhibited more than twenty large format prints.
Francesca Piqueras is represented in France by the Cyril Guernieri gallery and in the USA by the Holden Luntz gallery (Palm Beach).
Francesca Piqueras : De pierre et de sable
Exhibition extended until November 11, 2023
Galerie Cyril Guernieri
29 Rue Mazarine
75006 Paris
galerieguernieri.com
