Light in the light [Dark Upon Darkness]

2024

Fernando Prats’ work does not seek to push the limits of language; rather, it positions itself where language has already been exhausted, to add its own vocabulary. His is not the impulse of the avant-garde, which sought to rupture and reinvent. Prats arrives, for instance, when the Richter scale has already recorded the most powerful earthquake in measurable history—May 22, 1960, magnitude 9.5—and it is on that same seismogram that he continues to mark tremors for which there are no established indexes.The same happens with maps. When geophysical, economic, military, and transportation maps have already encoded the world in their systems of symbols, Prats introduces fields of force made of smoke and perforated paper blocks. His gestures demand that we speak of experiences geography is not equipped to name.That ability to articulate meaning just as language collapses is the fruit of his work with smoke. Fernando Prats has developed a technique that prepares surfaces with a veil of soot to register tension and mystery—just as a poem might. Smoke is a dark, rising element, so light it floats, the visible residue of energy in transformation. From ancient times, smoke has been part of rituals, evidence of sacrifice, a sign of tragedy, a medium of purification, or a method for preserving food. In Prats’ work, it becomes a sensitive field that captures not only natural phenomena but also personal, symbolic, and historical experiences. It is a matrix where his visual and poetic language is constantly renewed.Smoke interacts with the world in the same way poetry does. Poetry does not name or describe—at least, those are not its strengths. What it offers is an act of observation that reveals hidden truths, gestures that transform what we thought we knew. In Prats’ work, smoke enshrouds the surface in a dense veil. Through it, one can glimpse the outlines of Antarctica, Africa, the Mediterranean—maps, yes, but suffused with other meanings.Africa becomes the place from which rafts flee hunger and persecution; the Mediterranean becomes a palimpsest of migrations, invasions, and conflict; and the shadow cast by an eclipse over Gaza is no longer lunar but a deep well of pain. Antarctica ceases to be the world’s last white expanse and becomes a charged frontier: the edge of the industrial world, reservoir of wildness, of untouched water, of that which still escapes domination.The Poetic Gesture: Body, Breath, and the Art of MarkingAmong the most striking dimensions of Prats' work is his method of creation, which combines conceptual rigor with deeply physical, even ancient techniques. Smoke may seem immaterial, but the artist engages it through a series of precise gestures that leave marks as real as any cartographer’s.Prats uses organic materials—feathers, as in the works titled Aletazos (Wingbeats); twigs embedded into seismographic lines; and, most vitally, his own body. These materials are not decorative but formative. They act on the smoke: pressing it, disrupting it, channeling its diffusion.Perhaps the most primitive—and most moving—of his techniques is one shared with Paleolithic artists: the act of blowing pigment through a tube. This simple tool, a rudimentary airbrush, was used some 18,000 years ago to trace outlines of hands and figures onto cave walls. Prats adopts the same method today, not as mimicry but as a resonance across time, a return to the origin of mark-making.In both cases—cave painter and contemporary artist—the surface is activated by breath, by pneuma, the vital force. This breath maps experience not only in form but in intent. Prats uses his breath to define both positive shapes (the shadow of the moon in eclipse) and negative space (the corona of light around it).These dual forms mirror the stenciled hands of cave art: presence and absence, assertion and outline.The monochrome pieces in this exhibition, heavy with smoke, carry the echo of those first pigments pressed to stone. Smoke, in this context, is not only pigment but history: the smoke of fires, of bombs, of forest blazes—destruction and transformation alike. It is the trace of human occupation through time, but also the medium through which new forms emerge.Maps That Say More Than SpeechWhat Prats creates are not maps in the geographic sense, but intuitive cartographies. His pieces reject the conventional logic of symbols—where everything is reduced to a legible code—and instead translate the world into a personal, affective lexicon.Smoke, as the residue of fire, allows the map to become a subjective reading—not of terrain, but of an inner landscape. Fragility rises in the soot. So do tensions, histories, conflicts that no line of demarcation can resolve. These are smoked cartographies, where the embers of the present still burn beneath the surface.His Eclipse Polar series, for example, shows atmospheric views of a circular shadow surrounded by a ring of light over Antarctica. This is a continent beyond the industrialized world, yet it still remembers the ancientness and futurity of the Earth. A space without sovereignty, dedicated to exploration and science. Prats’ intervention overlays this map with smoke, obscuring it—and thus revealing what reason alone cannot. That ring of light—which I have elsewhere described as a circus of luminescence—surrounds a dense, black center. We recognize the shape of Antarctica, but something uneasy seeps from that clarity. In summer, when the sun never sets, the ring becomes light upon light. In winter, the eclipse renders darkness upon darkness. The work's power lies in how it veils and unveils, in how it withholds and exposes the seismic pulses beneath the rational grid.Without drawing a single migration route, the Mediterranean eclipse marks the same region of abandonment where so many attempt the crossing in fragile vessels. In the Gaza Maps, including works like Mediterráneo y Gaza 1 (2023), the eclipse’s shadow reveals what political maps are designed to ignore: points of deliberate blindness, lives shattered by the lines that divide.In another series, mute maps, paper blocks are affixed to the surface—perforated with mountain ranges, knots, or ridges. These are not silent maps, but maps of muteness. Silence is an abstract state, perhaps even an ideal. Muteness, by contrast, implies conflict, repression, and resistance. One can be silenced by force, by trauma, or by choice. In Prats’ maps, muteness becomes eloquent—a force of compression, a refusal of noise that nonetheless speaks volumes.A Vertical Progression Toward the PoeticThis exhibition can be understood through a vocabulary of ascension. If the Richter scale culminates at 9.5, Prats continues the seismogram with smoke, first showing plants and organic materials, no longer registering the violence of a quake but rather a kind of dance. Then come mountain systems, where layers of oil paint suggest both mineral richness and upward thrust. Above the mountains, condors beat their wings; Aletazos captures that gesture. Higher still: constellations imprint their sensitive traces in smoke.A question relevant to Prats’ work—especially when observed in its vertical progression—is whether it constructs or searches for a principle of hope. One could fall into a vague, binary reading that opposes hope to pessimism, following Georges Didi-Huberman in Survivance des lucioles, where he invites us to “rethink our principle of hope.” To embrace such a principle would be to affirm that this is an artist who trusts in the power of art to emancipate consciousness and lay the foundation for a better society. That is not the case with Prats. His verticality is a force vector, a direction of experience and reflection, but within the process there is no intention to redeem or impose a vision of the future. This ascending vector originates in the tectonic underground and manifests through the shadow of the eclipse on his maps. It is fully aware of the blind spots where pain settles, yet it does not assume that awareness as defeat. Verticality becomes a way to lift one’s gaze, and likewise, a way to articulate human experience so that it finds a place in the present—rising from catastrophe and from its own destructive impulses. The reverse side of the eclipse maps, of the Gaza maps, and of the mute maps, is tenderness: this is his antidote to distrust. For this reason, verticality projects itself as a vector through language. A vocabulary reaches its limit, and upon that limit, another is erected that carries the work one step further. Even the poem is not a summit—it is another vector launched toward another silence.And beyond all that: poetry.This is where the work culminates—in a verse by Gabriela Mistral, from her poem Despedida in the posthumous Poema de Chile, where a whistle calls her “with a stab of lightning.” Another vertical vector, another breath. Here, poetry is not an adornment but a final elevation, the last vocabulary that can rise above the Earth’s crust.And yet, what remains after poetry?Mute maps.Rodrigo Rojas (poet)