Maria Prats: instructions for not confusing the weird with the ugly

“Ugly?, ugly your mother!”.

The artist Maria Prats, who signs as Marria Pratts, usually answers like this to those who tell her that her paintings are ugly. "I do not understand. What I do seems very delicate to me. I also don't understand when they say that my style is very trashy. Trash of what? I guess who says that is people who have very gray lives, with inertia that they haven't even decided, and at the slightest they see a round that isn't round, they already collapse”.

In her paintings, almost always large format, the round ones are not round, the canvases are sometimes burned and there are twisted neons and symbols that are repeated, like broken clocks or ghosts that seem to have come out of a primitive video game. She with them she has just sold all her works in an exhibition at the Miquel Alzueta gallery in Barcelona. He also has a piece exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (Macba), it will soon be at the Ruttkowski 68 gallery in Cologne (Germany) and in February it will occupy a rotating space, Espai 13, at the Miró Foundation, in Barcelona.

The painting that she now hangs at Macba, entitled I feel music inside my head (Transformation of a blurred thought), is a good example of her style. It is eight meters long and is crossed by a long fuchsia line that she traced in a race. "It represents a wound, because there is no life without a wound," explains the artist. It contains 32 hidden words and burns that she made in the museum itself with a blowtorch that made the security team nervous.

The piece was cooked for days, hung with vine shoots and "fermenting", as she explains in her studio in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, an old industrial warehouse that offers an aspect somewhere between decadent and transgressive. With the help of her friend and also an artist and designer, Guillermo Santomà, Prats conditioned the workshop. They put up some beams, a wood stove and a kitchen, and they set up a kind of artistic shack using cardboard they bought on the street.

The photographer Nacho Alegre, one of the founders of the magazine Apartment, defined that study and refuge in Icon Design as "sexy and pleasant", a house "at an intermediate point between the extremely precarious and absolute luxury".

For years, the study was also his home and Prats says that some nights there were complicated. She had the feeling of being on the street. She played the music very loud and when her mobile data ran out, she turned the radio up to full volume, to feel accompanied. Does Ella not worry that those who see the photos of this report will think that she is, in some way, romanticizing poverty?; That she is nothing other than an artist playing shanties? “That would be horrible. I see posh people who come here, they take over a study and my eyes hurt to see it. For me, living here was not a choice. It was a necessity. He had no way to pay for a studio and a house. I've had a lot of junk jobs. I used to sell puzzles in a mall. The compañeras were the best, but we had a horrible boss. I've been a seasonal waitress and I've been cheating accepting commissions to make posters and things like that. I have seen many people fall by the wayside and abandon art because of the precariousness and how poorly everything is paid here. Now I have finally managed to make a living from painting, but it has cost me because I don't have a family that can support me”. From her father, the director Carles Prats, who was also an editor and underground gallery owner, and has directed award-winning films about Loquillo, Peret and Joe Strummer, the artist acknowledges having inherited a certain way of looking. "We have a very nice mutual respect."

Spaces are important in Maria Prats' career. Finding this, so spacious and with such high ceilings, she finally allowed her to be able to paint as she wanted, with the gestures that her body asks for. Placing several large canvases around her forming a kind of stage and walking around with loud music between all of them adding strokes or shooting paint with cannon shots with one of her pressure-firing devices. “I like to observe the raw fabric as if it were a rat and I a very ferocious cat, which comes out of an empty container very hungry. Sometimes I get on a chair and sometimes I walk around, looking at the fabric for a long time until I go into combat. There I develop a chain of movements, as if I were walking through a forest. It is a perfect moment that lasts only a few seconds and is very intense”, explains the painter.

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Her use of her spray also creates some confusion. “There are people who say that I do graffiti or urban art, and it seems to me that they don't know anything. For me, painting is a more personal combat, it has nothing to do with being on the street”.

Before the workshop there was another key house in its formation. From the ages of 19 to 24, Prats lived with three other artist friends—photographers Alba Yruela, Rafa Castells, and Albert Mayol—in a ramshackle attic for which they each paid 100 euros a month. “That was like our university. Since the rent was so cheap, we covered it with anything. And then we did stuff all day. We had a group called Ultratomba, we did some expos in a basement until one day it flooded and filled with shit. We also gave concerts there and put together a fanzine. We were friends who loved each other very much and shared incredible ideals. Now the four of us have the same tattoo in memory of the flat: Pussy Gran Via”. That artistic collective apartment also served as a school for her and she avoided, she says, having to “deprogram” herself as she would have done if she had had a more formal artistic education. What she has learned she has done by intuition. “For example, I made this hole in the wall,” he says, pointing to a hole at least three feet in diameter in the studio, “before I knew who Gordon Matta-Clark was and what he was doing” (a New York artist who worked on several aspects of architectural intervention).

“There is like a kind of global telepathy. We think we are very special, but in the end we all do similar things”. That is why she is not convinced to talk about influences. Her style refers to Tàpies and Joan Brossa, who she likes, but who really inspires her, she says, are the people around her. "You can say that Cy Twombly has marked you a lot, but in the end, how many paintings of his have you seen? One?"

Prats is considered part of a "generational landscape" closely linked to Barcelona. “I think there are several artists who share some ideals. We are very romantic. We like beautiful things, but from a new perspective, and we like to build our own things, houses, furniture, spaces, clothes. In addition, the street inspires us. As my friend Pere Llobera says, we are alcoholics from experiences”, explains Prats.

Although there are artists from all disciplines on this scene, it is true that many, like Prats herself, have rediscovered painting, which previous generations pushed aside in favor of other disciplines. “It does seem that conceptual art has been trapped in the exhibition halls. I like painting because it can pierce your heart and leave you in dust. Or seeing a painting and being so happy you just want to go back to the studio and burn and paint non-stop. It has a magical and radical power”, she believes.

As painting is booming, there are not a few fashion brands and other fields that approach artists like her. In a sector in which each firm seeks to be different, there is a mad race to adopt artists who leave their mark on some of their products. Prats says that she understands the peers who accept them, but she, for now, says that she doesn't to all of them, even to some huge and well-known brands that arrive with tempting checks. "I told them that if they put me in a flat forever, then yes I would, and they didn't answer me again."

On another occasion, an exclusive club offered her a membership card and she replied that at that time she was sneaking into the subway for not paying the ticket, so she could hardly afford the annual fee. She does not rule out printing those emails and doing something with them one day, integrating them into an artistic project.

For now, Prats would like to do something else in her study-refuge. “I love having friends over for a meal. I would like to have a switch that, when pressed, turns the entire space into a clandestine restaurant, that sauce dispensers suddenly appear out of nowhere. It would be called The Sandwich Club. I already see the neon.”