Marc Prats (b. 1995) is a London-based artist from Barcelona. He holds an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art. Prats has exhibited internationally, with his most recent show at Hew Hood Gallery in London (2022). He is also the recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2021).
His practice explores the consequences of social media and mobile devices upon our cognition. He sees his works as post-digital representations of the human mind unfolding into a series of narratives, which combine digital and analogue processes to discuss his generation’s experience with ubiquitous devices.
Those born before the 2000s entered a world that was free from widespread Internet, but this changed dramatically in just two decades. Many were forced to adapt to this development and can now easily navigate new media, yet still remember simpler times with a certain nostalgia. It is perhaps this longing for the analogue that makes his generation more susceptible to psychological conditions associated with prolonged screen use. Such tensions, combined with the fact that he was born with a sight-threatening condition, which was worsened by exposure to screens during his upbringing, led him to want to explore how digital technologies mediate our lives and how their effects can be counteracted with art.
Many facets of the Internet, social media included, are designed to be appealing, enthralling, even addictive. They are made to capture consumers’ attention for as long as possible by presenting as much content as possible, leaving no time to actually think about what is being taken in. Prats’ paintings aim to subvert these mechanisms from within. They do so by captivating his viewers with the beauty and detail of the digital aesthetics he employs as well as by the ambiguous digital narratives that his work deals with, so that the consumption of the technological elements displayed is slowed down and imbued with new, more profound meanings.
