ARTEXT : La Biennale di Venezia
54 Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte
Arsenale, Artiglierie

GRAN SUR
Fernando Prats

Fernando Prats is the perfect example of the contemporary creator who is able to remain open to the wonderful paths of painting without clutching to established dogmas or surrendering to an ultimately decorative hybridization. He resumed the conception of painting as an event with incredible lucidity and an atypical passion for dripping.

Fernando Prats works almost as an alchemist, curing with smoke the old surface of representation so that now things can be produced which are not, in any way, anecdotal.
His work is simultaneously a different manifestation of subjectivity and a rare withdrawal, which leads me to think that the hand (the appendix that has converted us in what we are today) is becoming unessential. Fernando Prats effectively stones his paintings, he lets the branches whip them or that the doves leave the marks of the flapping of their wings on them; the photographs of his work process reveal that he even licks the smoke cured surface of the paintings in order to leave enigmatic traces, or that even worms “draw” fascinating labyrinthical lines on the fertile territory of this other incarnation of painting.

Fernando Prats wants to overcome the “painting instruments” so that the work of art can be produced in the gap between the world and earth; it is, in fact, the hermeneutic space of friction between that what is at hand and that which is kept as a treasure (in a deliberate simplification of the Heideggerian considerations on the origen of the work of art) where the truth is molded with some luck and weather permitting.

When Prats transports the plastic sheets, with which he had coated and veiled Ignacio de Loyola’s mystical cave of ilumination in Manresa, to the artic glaciers , he is materializing, in an extraordinary fashion, a new aesthetic geography. His rites are primarily related with his desire to contribute to the aesthetic commotion art that, since the Aristotles era, has been typified as catharsis. When catastrophe approaches, in that moment when life (figuratively speaking) becomes unbearable a purification happens, which, undoubtedly, teaches us something. The curtain drops or the “deus ex machina” percipitates to the stage with a racket so that logical thought can assume, after the period of hoping, the conflict of what we have left. It’s precisely what is left that Fernando Prats obsesses about, that which we do not know if is too much or too litle. Fortunately, rather than reiterate an aesthetization of the scatological (something manifestly normative in contemporaneity), what this creator elevates as an obscure map are the several trails of a nomad art.

Fernando Prats travels to the unknown but also towards the beginning, in his reduction to smoke of the pictorial surface he is not contented with Malevitch’s desert nor does he have nostalgia for what lies behind (the Byzantium gold) but in what triggers fate, he acts so that the magical reveals itself.

The Sismografías project that Fernando Prats will present in the Chilean pavillion in the Venice Biennial establishes a dialogue between three pieces, which are, in themselves, processes of time condensation: an intervention centered around the volcanic eruption in Chaitén, an impressive series of pieces from after the tremendous Chilean earthquake in 2010 and a neon letters installation, which aims to revive the advertisement published by Shackleton when he recruited men capable of facing the antarctic trip.
Prats plans, in an extremely intense and committed way, a map of tremors and fractures of nature, which is more cruel than sublime, composing a sort of processual vanity. It isn’t only a “scripture of disaster”, using Blanchot’s terminology, but also a manifestation of the subject as one who, in spite of all, is capable to assume an heroic position. Even if being shipwreck is the only possible adventure from the starting to the finishing, it doesn’t mean that we have to commune with nihilism, on the contrary, the catastrophe forces us to start from the beginning, even if treading lightly.

Fernando Prats travels across his country with a map blurred by smoke, treading on a soil made into ash, inserting his papers into the cracks, gazing into a glacial horizon. His remarkable seismographic method demonstrates that the map is not only a representation of the territory but also that, following an extreme event, its testimony is inevitably sombre.

Curatori - Fernando Castro Flórez

Artisti : Fernando Prats

Web site:http://www.thisischile.cl/chilebiennale/