Franta / Tváří v tvář (Face to Face)

This catalogue for an exhibition held in Ostrava in 2015 presents the work of the internationally renowned artist František Mertl – known worldwide as Franta. He has spent his life partly in Czechoslovakia and partly in France, where he is now a citizen, so it is logical that the authors of the texts in the catalogue are French (Olivier Keappelin) and Czech (Marie Dohnalová). The exhibition and its catalogue explores Franta’s commentary on a world full of deception, peril and violence. Franta encodes these themes in his paintings, which frequently exude a frantic instinctiveness and an unscrupulously depicted ruthlessness – manifested equally in humans and in animals. It is as if Franta has sought to generalize harsh existential principles into a single mode of expression and to depict it in the rawest possible terms regardless of whether he shows the human or animal world. Besides the texts by the two authors mentioned above, the catalogue also includes a biographical account of Franta’s life.