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

This Long Minute is the second 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.

“’Metamorphosis’ is a new story about initiation. The feminine figure was taken from a Cranach the Elder painting, the landscapes are indecipherable combinations of photographs taken by Pratas and paintings from Courbet and Constable.”

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