Fernando Prats

Fernando Prats (Santiago de Chile, 1967) lives and works in Barcelona. His work is known for the actions or expeditions undertaken mostly in Chile, including among others Gran Sur, Elephant Island, Antarctica (2011), Acción Lota, acción Géiser del Tatio, acción Salar de Atacama, acción Mina a Rajo Abierto (2006) or Congelación, on the Collins glacier, Chilean Antarctica (2002).

Fernando Prats work is determined by the relationship with the energy of nature and the territory, rooted in the ties that he establishes fundamentally with his origin country, Chile. The Andes mountain range, the Atacama desert, the Pacific Ocean and Antarctica, as well as memory, are inescapable and constitutive links of his work, turning the Chilean landscape into his poetic and pictorial language from a contemporary practice. Based on the constant observation of the context, nature, the human being and his intervention in critical situations, the work of Fernando Prats is understood from the concept of «pictorial geolicity», that is to say, painting as a mobilizing agent, an active surface that works through layers that open up to new displacements. It is perceived in this way as a process that transforms the language of the work itself from a perspective far from the rational, seeking a space of creation free of judgment that considers chance as a revealing force. The use of smoke as a primary element in his work, a materiality of ancestral use, allows, through an original technical process, to capture the traces and pulsations that become in the painting.