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

This Long Minute is the last of a series 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.

“[The previous] Long Minute was called ‘Metamorphosis’, and is a new story about initiation. This minute is called ‘Submundo’ (Underworld). According to mythology, Hades, god of the Underworld, fell in love with the beautiful Persephone when he saw her picking flowers one day in a meadow. The god then carried her off in his chariot to live with him in the dark Underworld.

Pratas has taken the human figures from paintings of Von Stuck and Renoir. The animals he collected from the social networks and from medieval authors whose names he couldn’t identify and the landscapes were created by blending his photographs in photoshop.”

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