FERNANDO PRATS

(Santiago, 1967)

What drives Fernando Prats’ practice is mostly his desire to expand the boundaries of painting. With this purpose in mind, he turns to various disciplines and media. Interested in the transformation of matter, he has recorded natural phenomena on smoked surfaces, such as the flapping of bird’s wings, waves, and seismic vibrations; yet he is also drawn to the visual representation of human activities. The source of inspiration for Great South (2011), the artwork with which he represented Chile at the 2011 Venice Biennale, was the expedition proposed by Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton in 1911 and advertised in The Times with the same text included in the artist’s subsequent work. Although Shackleton recruited hundreds of people for his voyage to the “end of the world,” the journey never took place. Nearly a century later, Prats set sail on his own epic route, taking the words of the ad with him and installing them on land in a contemporary format. Their fatalism may now be read as sarcasm.