Roman Franta is well-known for his paintings of insects, thus the onlooker will feel he knows what to expect from this artist. But this is not the only facet of the artist’s work, although it may well be the most striking. Despite there being several obvious differences, they all have a common premise which is a recurring motif of plants and animals. Now a social theme has also been added.
As a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, Franta began replicating abstract expressionism and Japanese calligraphy. Meanwhile, he enjoyed taking photographs, especially of nature in every detail. After his graduation in 1995, this interest evolved into a plant motif in his art, such as detailed paintings of tree trunks. And abstract works of fruit---amorphous arrangements in which a few finely shaped details emerge. His big break came with the paintings Shrubs and Rice in 1996 in which individual organisms are miniaturized upon hundreds of leaves and rice seeds, creating an optical illusion---before one’s eyes they appeared to be moving and fluttering about. Individual shapes of seeds and leaves are painted in realistic detail and the total effect is a somewhat shimmering abstract. At the same time he began to paint the animal world such as in paintings composed of snakes. But again we can only see this in small detail so that the tangled composition seems to continue endlessly. Thereafter we have the famous Bugs paintings where a bug is the basic unit of construction; it became a symbol and the motif of the series.
Later Franta created a series of portraits including those of Nick Cave, Martin Kippengerger, Mick Jagger, Timothy Leary, the Beatles, personal friends and even Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Klaus. And after the year 2000, his subject matter began to include social themes with political overtones (Hitler, Ghandi and others), plus famous historical quotes and sports, especially tennis (Franta is a superb tennis player). Individual motifs originating from different social worlds often end up meeting in one painting. It’s actually a sort of artist’s collage. Irony and often even sarcasm are evident in the interpretations of plant and animal life when the patterns are discerned. A convergence of two diverse themes, such as tennis figures like Williams, an Andy Warhol portrait, with a snippet of a David Hockney painting in the background, have no logical explanation. But then, aren’t the absurd connections in people’s stories of most interest to everyone?
These random and strange combinations are also encountered in the series painted during the years 2008 to 2009 that are displayed in this exhibition. On each canvas we see in monumental scale small pieces of an animal’s body---leopard, jaguar, white tiger, a bear, giraffe, hippopotamus, gorilla, chameleon and an elephant. And in the corners, a political collage is clustered of well-known places---the White House, Wall Street, Reichstag, Big Ben, Lenin’s Mausoleum, and many others. Along with the animals in the zoo (Franta goes to a zoo in every city he visits), one can discern symbolism and social commentary. Encountering an actual animal is unlikely and has no concealed meaning; in fact, it’s commonplace. And although it doesn’t seem so at first, a deeper study reveals a sharp-edged historical-political and ironic commentary. The paintings are symbolic descriptions of societies. Man has concocted irrational intrigues since time immemorial, so all that is left for us is to make humorous or ironic comments. Exactly what Roman Franta’s paintings invite us to do.
Ivona Raimanová