Mars as original art on canvas by a Czech artist.

last minute marsLast minute Mars-All inclusive 2017

It is Sunday, early evening in November, polluted water falling from the sky runs into the faces of tourists marching heroically through Prague despite the impending bad weather. It seems as if the weather has decided to punish this rebellious mother of cities. An atmosphere of resignation and longing looking out the window. Not so at the Peron Gallery… Four men run around the gallery space jostling paintings and pieces of art installations for display. There is a slightly hectic, strategic-planning mood in the gallery, akin to the construction of the Tower of Babel. Among other things, men are thinking about life on Mars.
It is not for the first time in Bohemia that people are thinking about life on other planets. and at the same time creatively ventilating these thoughts. A similar time is remembered, but perhaps 100 years earlier in the Krkonoše Mountains, and dreamy mediums fall into a trance to glimpse something of life on other planets within themselves. They painted and drew flowers and creatures inhabiting planets of unknown worlds.
However, Dan Trantina paints a world on a Mars already colonized by humans in the near future. Mars is to him what Africa was to the white patriarchal European at the beginning of the 20th century. A wild, unexplored land, a sun-exalted landscape, a lavish safari and new possibilities for self-realization. Trantina also adds in a footnote – an excuse to paint well. Trantina‘s paintings full of animal expression are a kind of escape from the reality of a rainy autumn day into a cosmic perspective. T.‘s paintings are thus maps of his inner universe, which at first glance seem unreadable, but new cosmic spaces open up to the patient viewer of his paintings after further observation. Trantina is a man of letters who distilled the literary language into the language of colors. His paintings hide funny Maupassant stories. Colors are matter and feelings at the same time, they have their own meaning, and meanings gain importance and seriousness through their mutual and stormy interaction. The brush is the baton that conducts the colorful space symphony with the following story: A beautiful visitor from the planet Earth will visit the planet Mars. Suddenly excited by the charged freedom and the stories whispered conspiratorially by her colleagues about supermen from the red planet, she pulls out her smartphone with the grace of an office goddess, and turns on the Tinder app with divine anticipation. After a few movements of her finger with a pink painted nail, she finds an extraterrestrial who could satisfy the desires which earthly men could not. But hey, the situation goes awry and our heroine is approached by a menacing Vermilion Martian with a desire entirely at odds with his profile photo. However, goodness and love win in the end and a rocket is fired from an American spaceship to pacify the Martian, and thus our misfortune, to save the blonde.
In closing, I will borrow a quote from Emanuel Swedenborg, the great traveler and connoisseur of other planets: "All that I have written down is as true as the fact that you now see me before you. I could say much more if I were permitted. But after death you will know everything, and then we will have much more to say."

Jan Melena