Fernando Prats – Vuelo & Sobrevuelo

17.11 – 22.10 / 2014
Galerie Analix Forever, Geneva

Moving between performance and painting, Fernando Prats shows, aestheticises and exalts the work of the elements. Using a “smoke machine,” he blackens with charcoal smoke pieces of paper in various formats. These will be the canvases on which he then lets nature do the painting. He places his smoked paper in some outdoor location, and its local meteorology and specificities – oceanic, desert, earthquake – does the rest. Paper retains the imprint of permanently moving nature, of another kind of life. This life can also be the life of birds: in his studio, Prats builds cages, and canaries, doves and other inseparables now become the master’s assistants. Guiding the birds with his own hands, in the cage with them, Prats erases the smoke with which he has previously covered his paper or canvas, leaving the extraordinary shapes made by the wings. Following on from Yves Klein, “the stealer of bodies,” Prats “steals” the wing beats of his avian assistants and transforms them into so many mobile brushes, brushes that are lighter and cleverer, more innocent and revealing than his own could be. Prats makes nature his auxiliary so that painting can be rediscovered, again and again. For this first solo show in Switzerland, Fernando Prats, who with “GRAN SUR” represented Chili at the Venice Biennial in 2011, investigated the “Nazca lines”, south of Peru. He recently flew over Nazca, observing with the greatest attention and fascination those drawings designed by men of the surface of earth, probably as far back in time as 2000 years ago. Condors, hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, as well as geometrical figures, spirals, trapeziums, triangles… offer a novel space where, in Prats’ mind and works, these “earth drawings”, coming back from remote times, get together with his very own, contemporary drawings. Birds are everywhere.