* Opava
Aleš Zapletal is a painter who depicts a familiar, mysterious timeless environment. The romantic tone of the landscapes he depicts mixes with the ghostly atmosphere of living things and places, referring to various cultural contexts. Zapletal this presents his own conception of the landscape, as a place created by human. We can ask whether it is a post-apocalyptic landscape or conversely a kind of paradise of harmony and peace, in which the human spirit resides in the products of its own work. Zapletal systematically creates a map of an imaginary territory, which is not a hiding place from the real world, but the scene of a fable in which the most burning themes of contemporary planetary existence are reflected.
In the Permaculture image cycle, artifacts and natural objects function as equivalent elements of image "ecosystems". The paintings from the Somaterra cycle are inhabited by hedonist institutions, shaped from fragments of depictions of the human body. Distorted memories of yogic asanas and other bodily archetypal gestures are formalized in the design of imaginary monuments. The painting Extinct Species juxtaposes fads of modernist design and the other sides of the modern era, embodied in the silhouette of the extinct Tasmanian Waxwing.
