PareidoliaJoan Fontcuberta

We can happily say that the work by Catalonian artist Joan Fontcuberta is known in the Latin American art scene. Every so often there is a publication, a review, a critique or exhibition that allows us to read between the lines about his stance against reality, absolute truths and the central role given to the political establishment. His postures are the natural result of having been brought up under the shadow of Franco's military regime in Spain and the Cold War. It was a period of time in which all the governments and political postures shaped the realities that guided the world as they wished. And this has been as of late the history of humankind: a tangled series of religious, political, and social postures constructed to replace—or to abuse—other ones; each presented as order and truth. And this is just a taste of the things that will prompt us to ask: why has the construction of reality been so essential and difficult? Is not this very question a sort of ontological incongruity? Are not my eyes enough to discern truth from construct? One of the central elements of this exhibition is the affirmation of doubt… and therein lies another paradox. Doubt in the work by Fontcuberta is revealed through the framework of the political construction that resulted from the space race between the Soviet Union and the US. It can also be observed in this artist's interest in discovering and cataloging strange specimens from nature—which turn out to be fake taxonomic collections and "discoveries" of animals invented by the artist. There are also his "miracles," in which he makes clear that the media plays a central role in determining what we want to believe. Thus, this exhibition could very well be approached as a relentless inquiry into the world in which we live and the manner in which we inhabit it. Fontcuberta's work tells us that deception has been necessary for so many centuries that we may no longer be able to know what reality actually is. It is possible that reality turns out to be so terribly unbearable that we may have to resort to other ways of seeing and inhabiting the world. This exhibition by Joan Fontcuberta uses fictions in order to bring us closer to the truth. It makes fun of what we see and the manner in which we process what is in front of us. It mocks the truth behind photographs and the systematic ways that we have designed to eliminate error. We enter this exhibition with one or two certainties and live it with thousands of questions that will remain in our heads for some time: that is the miracle that Fontcuberta offers.