Anamorphosis Portrait Art By Bernard Pras

Bernard Pras, born March 22, 1952 Roumazières-Loubert in Charente, is a French visual artist. He lives and works near Paris in Montreuil. Bernard Pras is a French artist whose bold re-imaginings of artistic heritage force you to reexamine the way we look at visual art – which is itself a prism through which the artist channels a unique way of translating thoughts, emotions and ways of interpreting the world around us. Pras adds an extra dimension to familiar paintings, photos and images, often choosing materials that enhance certain aspects of his source material and allow the viewer to reevaluate their original impressions of said source.
Pras is not the first assemblage artist – for that, you have to go back about 450 years to Milan, Italy, and a talented painter named Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-93). Arcimboldo, unusual for his time, painted portraits that seemed normal from a distance but upon approaching, revealed themselves to be skilfully composed congeries of objects. The most famous examples of his technique are four generic portraits from 1573 named for each of the four seasons and assembled from plants and other items corresponding to the time of the year. Arcimboldo was exposed to a new generation of admirers in the mid-1970s when his painting Water was used as the cover art for the album Masque, the third studio album by the rock group Kansas. Just how much did Arcimboldo influence Pras? Only he can say, but it’s certain that Pras thought enough of Arcimboldo to produce a composition based on one of his iconic works.