With force and conviction, Francesca Piqueras returns to the stage where man and nature confront one another. Back in the marble quarries of Carrara, in Tuscany, the artist continues a trilogy begun with Movimento and Marbre. This time, she focuses her gaze at the very surface of the rock, capturing close-up the fractures and scars of an unending conflict between the marble citadel and the harsh machines that besiege it. To the gigantism of this titanic enterprise—extracting colossal blocks of immaculate stone from the open mountainside—Francesca Piqueras opposes a minimalism verging on pure abstraction, an enigmatic calligraphy that reveals the memory of a mountain assailed for millennia. Each line, each fragment, tells in open book form the story of an unceasing work of erosion and excavation—piercing and leveling the peaks for so long that the generations who follow have forgotten the mountain’s original contours. Through her lens, Piqueras records the symbolic graphic traces of this telluric past, composing in sober, powerful images a singular yet universal story: that of humanity, eternally compelled to reshape the world around it. True to her artistic ethics, the artist does not take a stance on the deeper motives behind this perpetual destruction. Her vision—refined and elegant as an ideogram drawn in Indian ink—offers an aesthetic approach perfectly mastered, transcending any simplistic opposition between humanity and nature. What is affirmed here is the artist’s perception: a lucid exploration of industrial excesses, rendered with an eye that finds beauty amid a constant, unseen violence whose traces remain unmistakable. Francesca Piqueras knows how to lay her eyes upon the splendors of the world. Playing with light and form, with the angles and volumes of a rock alternately rough or silky, she gracefully evokes the torments and resilience of the mountain. Her unique visual language—akin to the poetic imagery of Henri Michaux, or to the lyrical abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock, and the Cobra Group—reveals, with modesty and without ostentation, what beauty still endures in a universe surrendered to chaos.

Joël Halioua