Claudia Fuggetti: Palinopsia | Camara Oscura Galeria de Arte
Claudia Fuggetti, Cardi, "Metamorphosis" series, 2024. Baryta print; Courtesy of the artist and Camara Oscura Galeria de Arte. © Claudia Fuggetti.
Written by Amy Wei
Claudia Fuggetti’s Palinopsia, currently on view at Madrid’s Camara Oscura Art Gallery as part of the 2025 PHotoESPAÑA Festival, is a luminous, disquieting meditation on the instability of perception in an age of ecological and technological flux. Drawing from her Metamorphosis series, Fuggetti constructs a hallucinatory visual language where nature and memory dissolve into one another, leaving behind spectral traces of a world we no longer fully inhabit. Fuggetti does not depict reality so much as she reveals how its image remains with us, distorted, illusory, and haunted by memory.
Claudia Fuggetti, Fauna, "Metamorphosis" series, 2024. Baryta print; Courtesy of the artist and Camara Oscura Galeria de Arte. © Claudia Fuggetti.
The title, Palinopsia, refers to a neurological condition in which visual images persist after the stimulus has disappeared. Fuggetti invokes this phenomenon to explore how our perception of the natural world is increasingly mediated by memory, digital intervention, and cultural abstraction. In her hands, the condition becomes a metaphor for how nature continues to echo even as it vanishes, how perception lags behind transformation, and how what we see is never just what is in front of us. Her works are not records but residues.
Claudia Fuggetti, Yves, "Metamorphosis" series, 2024. Baryta print; Courtesy of the artist and Camara Oscura Galeria de Arte. © Claudia Fuggetti.
The subjects of these images—flora, fauna, the human body—are rendered less as forms and more as vibrations. In Yves (2024), the soft contours of a woman’s face melt into hues that no longer resemble the texture of skin, identity, or time. Yves establishes the tone for a world where even intimacy is glitched. Similarly, Lightflower (2024) stages a figure at the threshold of dissolution, luminous and anonymous. She stands in a floral tunnel, surrounded by whorls of color and digital bloom, but her overexposed face erases recognition. She could be an angel, an avatar, or an afterimage of oneself. Nature transcends physical place and emerges as an interface one passes through, briefly illuminated, before fading out.
Claudia Fuggetti, Dragonfly, "Metamorphosis" series, 2024. Baryta print; Courtesy of the artist and Camara Oscura Galeria de Arte. © Claudia Fuggetti.
In works like Dragonfly (2024) and Fauna (2024), Fuggetti reanimates the natural world as a kind of visual error. A dragonfly perches on a branch that seems plucked from an infrared dreamscape. A deer, awash in synthetic pinks and lavenders, gazes out with uncanny composure. These animals are more symbolic than alive. Fuggetti’s inversion of color and scale transforms them into creatures of myth or memory, caught between the real and its digital representation.
Claudia Fuggetti, Lightflower, "Metamorphosis" series, 2024. Baryta print; Courtesy of the artist and Camara Oscura Galeria de Arte. © Claudia Fuggetti.
Across these images, Fuggetti never gives us nature directly. What we see instead are its phantoms: ecological remnants filtered through memory, digital saturation, and cultural longing. Her vision, steeped in the uncanny, recalls not just what the natural world is, but how it flickers through our consciousness now, dislocated and mediated. These are not places you can go. They are visual echoes of a world we’re already losing.
Claudia Fuggetti, Hands, "Metamorphosis" series, 2024. Baryta print; Courtesy of the artist and Camara Oscura Galeria de Arte. © Claudia Fuggetti.
