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, the National Art Gallery of Tirana, MAXXI - National Museum of the Arts of the XXI Century (Rome), MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art of Bologna, the Royal Palace of Caserta, and Les Rencontres d’Arles. His photographs — including reportages and portraits — have appeared in publications such as International Herald Tribune, Courrier International, La Repubblica, Il Corriere della Sera, Il Giornale dell'Arte, The Observer, L'Officiel.
In 2024, he publishes his third monograph, Clay Ghost, a project which has been presented through a series of exhibitions and events in Rome, Paris, London, New York, and Tbilisi. Here, 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; 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.