Born in Rome in 1974, Francesco Patriarca has developed an artistic path in which life and work intertwine inseparably. His professional formation, in fact, grows out of personal experience— moments lived and then transformed by the artist into visual projects rather than individual works. Active since the late 1990s, Patriarca has exhibited since 2002 in galleries, museums, foundations, and national and international institutions, including The Gossmichael Foundation (Dallas), The Dactyl Foundation (New York), Fondazione Pastificio Cerere (Rome), the Museum of the Trajan’s Markets (Rome), Musée Carnavalet (Paris), Rencontre photographiques en Sud Gironde, and the National Art Gallery of Tirana. His photographs, reportage, and portraits have appeared in publications such as the International Herald Tribune, Courrier International, La Repubblica, Lire,
and Regal. Among his most recent projects are an exhibition at the Museum and Botanical Garden of Rome, a show in London’s East End, and an artist residency at the Sanskriti Foundation in India. In 2024 he publishes his third monograph, Clay Ghost, a project in which photographs and paintings stage suspended presences - objects, spaces, and faces - that act as “ghosts” capable of revealing what the image normally conceals. He lives and works in Rome.
Although he employs various mediums, from painting to photography, it is the latter that forms the core of his research. Patriarca builds his series as chapters of an ever-expanding experiential archive: projects born from encounters, places, or lived conditions that the photographic medium translates into visual and mental mosaics. Thus personal memory becomes image in L'appartement, his first monograph published in Paris in 2002; spiritual life becomes narrative in The Accona Desert; communist Albanian architecture is transformed into reflection in Pyramids Project; the experience of detention in Mexico takes shape in Fourth Wall; collective traumas emerge in Amnesia; and environmental decay surfaces in Aggregates. Alternating high and low definition, sharpness and blur, his images never seek consolatory effects: they function instead as revelations, handing the viewer the responsibility of interpretation and the task of traversing an image that presents itself as a silent presence - almost an apparition.