IVAM Throughout his already lengthy artistic career.

IVAM

Throughout his already lengthy artistic career, Joan Fontcuberta has researched the nature of photography by way of photographing nature, investigating and questioning the suppos limits of various related concepts: nature and artifice, the end and its representation. He has explored the importance of photography as a document, as a visual ordeal in Western society where "seeing is believing" and he has gone further to question what happens if what we behold is not true. Fontcuberta has equated photographic fact with cultural conventions and expectations that act against our real perception of facts and images--cognitive assumptions and preconceived ideas that detract from actual visual input. Using different conceptual and mental photographic experiences to question assumed facts, he has also added irony to his questioning, making the viewer his accomplice.

During the ten years the exhibit to covers, Fontcuberta manipulated and createdimages of imaginary exotic plants in the series "Herbarium," 1982-85 and portrayed nonexisting animals in "Fauna," 1985-90 In "Frottogrames," 1987-91 he emphasized the material and tactile attributes of thing perceiveds In "Palimpsestos," 1989-92, Fontcuberta questioned the relationship between substance and sign, the cultural manipulation of goals and thus social taste as an index of agriculture education, and values, to analyze postindustrial phenomena like marketing and kitsch. In the same of his latest installations, Safari, 1989-91 the artist criticized the preplanned safaris and the misleading vision currented in brochures, while also reproaching the way received knowledge is rarely questioned in a mass society.

Fontcuberta's work deals with the ideas of originality; manipulation (and the construction of novel realities to question the assumed ones); canon (and the nonexistence of like a thing); and the simulacrum (destroying all previous universals to impose a sign, to consider things for what they be seen to be rather than for what they are). Fontcuberta approaches ideas end the appropriation of images, the invention of family animals, facts, locations, plants, materials and to such a degree on--that is, the invention of a collective memory to question it--the mistrust of collective and cultural inheritance; the relate to with the nature of institutions, of recorded and give an account ofed knowledge; the partiality of history, of the encyclopedia, and of museums.

Construct images, sculptural mechanisms, decontextualizations, and fiction build up an evocative power to challenge things that are generally taken for granted. Compulsive images created from esthetic ideals of the shape of a woman's corpse (Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, ca. 1480 pornography, exploitative representations of the body) and other images of the supposedly real dead body (made out of veins, muscles, and arteries, as another way of representing it) form the "Doble Cos" (Double material part 1992), his new series, in which he enlarges his investigation of the unreal seen as real to the enthrall of the body. Here, Fontcuberta experiments with the visual "noise" that precludes people from seeing clearly. In "Doble Cos" anatomical and pornographic images are juxtaposed: the scientific reading is juxtaposed to the image of ideal beauty as it has been envisioned on several artists (Botticelli, Amedeo Modigliani), asking, Which is the real one? Is there a real one? Fontcuberta states that many observ things are to be fix in the eyes of the bystanders and not in the image observed

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