Artists website → https://www.marcprats.com/

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Marc Prats Artist Statement

“My practice uses the narrative quality of painting to explore the liminal space between psychology and digital technology. It is through painting that I flesh out and subvert generational anxieties caused by or concerning the pervasive impact of gadgets and social media on the human psyche. In my view, painting’s physicality, slowness and history facilitate contemplation away from screens, away from the attention-grabbing algorithms that roam our digitized image-saturated culture to propagate content that fosters a superficial form of entertainment.

Perhaps counterintuitively, I combine digital aesthetics with gestural marks in search of a more enthralling journey than a kitten-filled Instagram reel. Namely, a series of intertwined painted stories that take my experience with technology as a starting point to discuss pivotal questions on life in the 21st century.”

Prats (b. 1995 in Barcelona) is a London-based Artist currently completing his MA in Painting at the RCA. A central concept in his work is that of the ‘weird’, which is defined as a disruption of the natural world by presenting the ordinary from the perspective of outside forces, leading to a sensation of strangeness or wrongness in the viewer. The weird has often been linked to science fiction and through it to the relationship between technology and the human condition. Prats’s preoccupation with science and technology is rooted in the fact that while he was born with extreme nearsightedness, advanced medical techniques helped improve his eyesight and have allowed him to lead a normal life. (…) These elements form elaborate allegorical narratives imbued with a dystopian aesthetic. (MAPA)

He often uses thick coats of pigment to depict awkward neon lights, glitches and out-of-place objects. His technique alternates between a flat application of paint and a broken brustroke reminiscent of impressionism or the pixels of a photograph, perhaps alluding to the image-saturated visual culture of our times. (MAPA)