It is necessary to make an earthquake from time to time, even in the living room. Especially if the aesthetic is threatened by the right motifs, which simply belong in the apartment. These motifs are blooming bouquets and flowers, here and there interrupted by a female nude. Simply living room standard. But to avoid the lazy stretching of the floral tradition as it stretches from the baroque through the bourgeois nineteenth century to the tame modernism of the following century, it is necessary to be somewhat punk, and the result is then in balance. So much for the recent exhibition of Dan Trantina (born 30. 4. 1965 in Přerov) at the Black Labou Gallery. 

The nude and the flowers cut through drawing and painting in a challenging abstracted approach, where the viewer may grope for a visual grasp of the wild surface. His orientation is made difficult, indeed the painter himself - otherwise an excellent creator of works on paper - creates sketches for his need not to get lost, in the case of the floral "compositions" in the form of surprisingly elegant collages. Trantino's work is undoubtedly about searching through a thicket of endless possibilities, about capturing the moment of glimpsing a motif, about the precise measure of stopping to layer and line, about taming the wild. Perhaps this is also the source of the feeling of one ever-generating work. The paintings bear personally modified testimony to personal and artistic freedom, an expressive outburst of truth in defiance of convention and expectation. Indeed, not unlike its almost identical namesake, the generationally congruent American film genius. With Dan, too, there is a certain uncompromisingness that is the only way to be genuine, but equally funny and sarcastic. Personal history is played out in the living room, the painter calming himself with the measure of his years and the number of his children. But revolution can also take place on the sofa. The spirit is untamed, materializing through the dissonance of painterly expression and banal motifs to both define and redefine the magic of personal creation. Always and everywhere in spite of.

Martin Dostál