Fernando Prats, Smoke Maps of Memory

A veil of smoke wraps maps, memories, and borders in Fernando Prats’ new solo exhibition at Matthew Liu Fine Arts. The Chilean artist, one of the most incisive voices in contemporary South American art, transforms the gallery into a laboratory of poetic geographies where volatile matter becomes language. Prats works where words begin to fail, replacing traditional coordinates with trails of smoke and perforated paper. His “smoke cartographies” do not describe the world - they reveal it: the outlines of continents emerge from dark veils, while the shadow of eclipses, migrations, and conflicts surfaces like a held breath. Africa, the Mediterranean, Gaza, Antarctica - each site becomes a metaphor for exile, frontier, memory, and renewal. His technique, both primal and technological, recalls the gestures of Paleolithic painters who blew pigment onto rock. Prats uses breath as a vital force, allowing smoke, feathers, and organic fragments to register what official maps cannot: the earth’s fragility, the persistence of stories, the invisible dance of time. In this way, art becomes an emotional seismogram - an extension of the Richter scale that captures not only the tremors of nature but those of human existence.