Rust and decay have always been fascinating and inspiring elements in the creative arts. Fashion heads will remember how Hussein Chalayan's "The Tangent Flows" (1993) collection featured garments made with fabric that the designer had buried in a friend's garden with some rusted iron pieces. The outfits Chalayan made with this fabric allowed the designer to explore the concepts of change and deterioration. In 1997 Martin Margiela produced instead for an exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam clothes on which moulds and bacteria grew. The garments were used as symbols of decomposition and consumption and therefore as metaphors for the capitalist processes of buying and throwing away.
Rust and decay are two key elements in the photographs of Francesca Piqueras. An exhibition opening at the Palazzo Ducale (Piazza Aranci 35) in Massa, Italy, later on this week will introduce to visitors twenty-five images from her archive.
"Paesaggio dell'umanità" (Landscape of Humanity; 28th October - 26th November) will feature a series of mesmerising industrial shots. The artist - daughter of Italian Grati Baroni and Jorge Piqueras, a Peruvian artist of Spanish origin (the couple were friends of Marcel Duchamp) - has a penchant for landscapes dominated by relics of decaying cargo ships, deserted shores and abandoned oil rigs and military structures.
There are indeed no humans in Piqueras' pictures, but a profoundly deep and tangible desolation. The twenty-five images included in the exhibition in Massa follow the creative path of the artist and focus on three main elements – the sea, the sky and the rusted metal of the ships portrayed.
Debris forgotten by people, the bodies of these ships stain the oceans and sands: the cargo ships assume indeed mesmerising shades of brown and green that constrast with the colours of the sea and sand that lull them.
Boats are definitely Piqueras' trademark as proved by her "Architecture of Absence" (2011) and "Architecture of Silence" (2012) series: the former focuses on ships being dismantled in dockyards in Bangladesh; the latter chronicles the slow yet relentless death of cargo ships sank and abandoned off the coast of Mauritania.
Piqueras mainly takes images of things that humans may have built for financial or war reasons, structures and means of transport that show how we often impose our own architectural views on spaces, violating them and forcing our vision on nature. Yet the photographer does not use her images to point her finger at humanity, but to silently chronicle the stages of human folly, its paradoxes and contractions and the way nature and time take their revenge upon us, sculpting the relics we leave behind, eating the human architectures and finally destroying them. Another key element in Piqueras' images is therefore the theme of transformation of matters and materials.
There is also a cinematic quality to Piqueras' darkly poetical images: the artist started taking pictures when she was 13, but was also attracted by art in general and by cinema and worked as film editor (one of her fave films remains Michelangelo Antonioni's "Deserto Rosso", a movie that may have inspired her the contrasts of neurotic colours in her images and her obsession with desolate industrial landscapes).
Some of her images could easily be photographs taken on the set of an industrial film, but they also tell us stories of transformations: the arrogant and strong oil rigs have morphed into decomposing skeletons; the monumental ships look like rotten carcasses or mythical leviathans dying on far-away shores, the wind producing screeching sounds as it passes through their decomposing lungs.
Tangible relics of a dystopian society or preludes to human destruction, Francesca Piqueras' photographs are memento mori postcards of wounded landscapes hinting at a silent post-industrial apocalypse.
Comments