Francesco Patriarca - Time Whispers in the Rose Garden of Love

Photoshelter 2026 is dedicated to the photography of Francesco Patriarca.

Born in 1974 in Rome, where he lives and works, Francesco Patriarca has developed an artistic career in which his life and work are inextricably intertwined. His professional development stems from personal experience, from lived moments that the artist translates into visual projects rather than individual works.

Active since the late 1990s, Patriarca has been exhibiting 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 Trajan’s Markets (Rome), the Musée Carnavalet (Paris), Rencontres de la photographie en Sud Gironde, the National Art Gallery of Tirana, the MAXXI – National Museum of 21st-Century Arts (Rome), the MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art of Bologna, the Royal Palace of Caserta, and Rencontres d’Arles. His photographs, photoessays, and portraits have appeared in publications such as the International Herald Tribune, Courrier International, La Repubblica, Il Corriere della Sera, Il Giornale dell’Arte, The Observer, and L’Officiel.

In 2024, he published his third monograph, *Clay Ghost*, a project that was featured in several exhibitions in 2025 in Rome (Galleria Eddart), Paris (Galerie Yvon Lambert and Galerie Maggiore GAM), and Tbilisi (Fotografia Gallery). Two more solo exhibitions are scheduled for 2026 in London (Artvisor) and New York (Coffey Street Studios).

Although he works in various media—ranging from painting to photography, sculpture, drawing, and music—photography serves as the starting point for his artistic exploration.

Patriarca constructs his series as chapters in an ever-expanding archive of experiences: projects born of encounters, places, or lived experiences, which the Roman artist translates into visual and mental mosaics, shifting the narrative to a meta-temporal plane.

The title of this series of works selected for Photoshelter 2026 makes a direct reference to the Sufi poem *Gulshan-i ‘ishq* (*The Rose Garden of Love*), written in the Deccan in 1657 by the Persian romantic poet Nusrati.

The story recounts the fantastical adventures of a prince in search of his beloved—a woman he has never truly known, having seen her only in his dreams. After many trials, the two lovers finally meet in the Rose Garden, a paradisiacal place and a symbol of unity and peace.

The Deccani language brings together the literary and cultural traditions of India and Iran, and, as in many poetic cycles of the Middle East, the garden appears in this text as a metaphor for paradise on earth—a repository of symbols and elements that enable humanity to attain harmony, peace, and love through spiritual quest.

In these photographs—a natural extension of the Clay Ghost project —Patriarca introduces floral and natural elements: a forest, the garden where he lives and works, his roses and vases, portrayed once again, but outdoors, in the shade of a large, centuries-old tree and arranged on a sheet that sways in the summer breeze, commonly associated in Sufi tradition with the breath of life and dialogue with the divine. There are also plants photographed in the gardens of mosques in Paris, Córdoba, and Damascus—the so-called chahār bāgh—which evoke the ancient Persian garden traditionally divided into four sections by water channels, corresponding to the four gardens of paradise described in the Quran.

Vases overflowing with roses and landscapes of unspoiled nature transport us to a distant, ancient time—to the idea of travel and exploration in search of the unknown, and to the allure of the desert and those places where the mystical Sufi culture took root.

Maria Savarese