Love's Easy Tears
© Francesco GioiaLove’s Easy Tears is a fractured ode to vintage beauty and emotional residue.
Using fragments of mid-century magazines, each collage reconstructs desire, memory, and identity as something both tender and volatile.
Faces are split, gestures loop endlessly, and floral or symbolic motifs interrupt the coherence of the self. This is not nostalgia, but erosion, a slow unraveling of how we once imagined love, longing, and the feminine image.
The series borrows its title from a Cocteau Twins song, evoking the soft ache of something beautiful falling apart.
At its core, Love’s Easy Tears explores the performance of femininity, the aesthetics of romance, and the violence of visual culture. These collages raise questions about the construction of beauty in media, the way women have historically been fragmented into parts, eyes, lips, gestures, and how memory distorts the image over time.
There’s also a subtle dialogue with desire and melancholy: how love is consumed, reassembled, and ultimately abstracted.
Through repetition, layering, and disruption, the series gestures toward both personal memory and collective visual memory, inviting viewers to question what remains when the surface is shattered.
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
InstituteTM (collectively Institute Pictures, Institute Studios, & Institute Artist) is redefining how stories are produced and told in the 21st Century. Founded by Producer Frank Evers and Director/Visual Artist Lauren Greenfield, we are a multiplatform production company representing auteur-driven storytellers across commercials, photography, fine art, film, and technology — and producing original work across every screen that those stories live on. Our multiplatform expertise and established global relationships in entertainment, commercial, fine art, and journalism create unmatched reach and cross-pollination of creative work. A film commission informs a photography campaign; a fine art practice shapes a commercial; an editorial relationship opens a documentary. Few companies operate fluently across all of these worlds. Institute was built this way from the ground up.
Clients include: Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft/Xbox, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Nike, Adidas, Lululemon, Under Armour, Dove, Maybelline, Clinique, Ulta Beauty, Aesop, Vaseline, LEGO, Balenciaga, Dior, Tom Ford, Kenzo, Supreme, Van Cleef & Arpels, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, Toyota, McLaren, Pennzoil, American Express, Chase, U.S. Bank, Burger King, Chobani, Corona, Pepsi, Nespresso, Lavazza, Velveeta, Airbnb, Four Seasons, Marriott, Instacart, eBay, JCPenney, Levi's, Swatch, Bang & Olufsen, Bayer, Pfizer, Genentech, EA, Planned Parenthood, Ad Council, and the United Nations. Editorial and publishing partners include: The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, TIME, Bloomberg, National Geographic, The Economist, Monocle, Le Monde, Stern, Sunday Times Magazine, Phaidon, Steidl, Abrams, Prestel, Chronicle, and Random House.
“Institute” is a registered trademark in the US, Europe, and United Kingdom. All rights reserved.
