Frederico Pratas is a Portuguese visual artist as well as a resident artist at MART in Lisbon.

This Long Minute is one of three by the artist.

In Pratas’ words: “My practice is painting, during confinement I created a series of slow motion videos in which I have appropriated works of well-known painters, Von Stuck, Renoir, Moreau, Matisse, Friedrich, Manet, Waterhouse, Courbet, Cranach the Elder to name a few. I then mixed these paintings with photographs of my authorship. The end result is a different thing, although the painted human figures are recognisable – the landscapes are not. The overall results are “new paintings” in motion. I am not a musician and do not play an instrument, except very deficiently, a guitar. For these I created, composed and actually played the sound through an app called GarageBand. Making these videos has created a way of thinking through painting, a side activity which feeds me and my processes.

“Ibn 'Arabi defines Barzakh as the intermediate realm or ‘isthmus’. It is between the World of Corporeal Bodies and the World of Spirits, and is a means of contact between the two worlds. Without it, there would be no contact between the two and both would cease to exist. It is described as simple and luminous, like the World of Spirits, but also able to take on many different forms just like the World of Corporeal Bodies can. In broader terms Barzakh 'is anything that separates two things’. It has been described as the dream world in which the dreamer is in both life and death. – Definition taken from Wikipedia.”

Concept & Creation | Frederico Pratas
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace