Roman Franta * 1962 White House, 2009

The painting work of Roman Franta moves across the fields of realistic illusionistic painting and geometric abstraction, as well as in the zone of expressive, gestural, and anti-aesthetic creation, with free artistic references to Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and European and American painting of the 1980s.

Roman Franta gained wider public recognition from the mid-1990s primarily as a painter of monochromatic rasters or figural and portrait paintings created from the structure of insect bodies. The starting point for this long-running painting series was a work made from grains of rice, which created an optical impression of movement on the canvas. The insect bodies, painted illusionistically—partially based on real species but also freely according to his own imagination—create a similar effect of motion, a constant and slight dynamic tremor of tiny, layered, and crawling creatures. Their presence, however, is only apparent from a certain distance in the portraits of politicians or famous music stars; at a greater distance, they transform into an abstracted, indeterminate mass of the body. This play with optics, which consciously refers to the illusionary deceptions of historical painting, particularly the Arcimboldo portraits, is in this case the author's transferred cultural and postmodern strategy.

The offered painting, Bílý dům (White House), belongs to a series of paintings from 2008–2009, in which Franta abandoned his previous cycle and focused on a new theme rendered with a distinctly expressive painterly delivery. The subjects in these works are representatives of the animal kingdom, ranging from the polar bear, elephant, giraffe, stag beetle, or the black jaguar featured in this painting. The animal world of wild beasts is confronted with the symbols of power and culture of human civilization, such as the White House, the Kremlin, Big Ben, Wall Street, or St. Vitus Cathedral, and others, which subtly appear in the distance against the backdrop of massive animal bodies. These unexpected and improbable encounters do not hold specific meanings for Franta; rather, they are a general reflection on the relationship between the instinctive, natural, and primal world of animals and its laws, versus the political and social constructs and strategies of human society. The scenes thus become critical historical-social commentaries on seemingly sovereign human civilization. Similar to his other painting series, Franta works here with exaggeration, humor, and an ironic remark about absurd situations and the political-social aspects of the contemporary world.

Roman Franta, painter, photographer, creator of objects and installations, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU) from 1990–1997 in the studios of Bedřich Dlouhý and Aleš Veselý. During his studies, he completed a course in abstract painting under Prof. J. Kotík and a course in calligraphy under Yan Qu, both visiting AVU in Prague. From 1993–1994, he studied at the San Francisco Art Institute in the USA. In 1995, he won 1st prize for painting in the SBC European Competition in London. In 1997, he was a finalist for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award, and in 2001, he received an award at the Biennale of Contemporary Art in Florence, Italy. He served as a lecturer from 1997 and as an associate professor from 2008 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He currently works as a painting lecturer at the Art & Design Institute in Prague.