 Unusual Personality
Thanks to Prudnikoff, this gallery has recorded a true boom: thousands of citizens visited the gallery; such a response on the part of the public was, most likely, also prompted by the advertisement spreading over a full page in the newspaper, in itself a unique event in the publishing practice in the capital.
A graphic artist and a designer by academic training, a painter by vocation over the last ten years, Prudnikoff is an unusual personality, and, taking everything into account, a personality that cannot be reduced to the conceptions and expressive formulae of out times. He does not care about either the nineteenth century or the experience of modernism;
in fact, he owes nothing to anybody, nor does he mimic anybody in the contemporary environment. As if his art came to a halt in the seventeenth century, as is his creativity came to end with the Italian decadence and mannerism. His thematic-expressive layer, dramatic "tenebroso" and "sfumatto" under the atelier light, licked-clean structure and outpourings of sentimentality take us back to the world of Guidrenni, Giovani Batista or Salvador Rosa. Due to the mentioned, the critics have been circumventing Prudnikoff, perceiving him a bizarre and quite marginal phenomenon in the Belgrade art of painting. Also, the extraordinary high prices of his works could only attract more attention of the public than that of critics. However, in the postmodern practice of the 80.s, along with retrograde tendencies, the canvases of Prudnikoff seem to have imposed a different interpretation and reading. Is one supposed to see in these works the anticipation of the art of "anachronism" and pronounce the author as its champion? Whether we like it or not, the center of gravity is also moving from the value and nature of works to the circumstances of a new phenomenon.
It is certain that Prudnikoff's art of painting is an example PAR EXCELLENCE of creativity outside the "protectiveness" of the times. However, while accepting this G. C. Argan's definition that relates to the views of the art of the 80.s, we cannot avoid a specific paradox: "nonprojectiveness" is still a specific "projectiveness" just as much as "antiaestetics" is a specific aesthetics. Anachonic in everything, Prudnikoff is not retrograde by everything but SUI GENERIS.
Therefore, is Prudnikoff a forerunner or only a dishistorical phenomenon. If we are in our views closer to the latter phenomenon than to the painters of our decade, who have been formed under the influence of Olive and Calvesi, are we quite right.
Z. MARKUS
POLITIKA, Belgrade, May 12, 1987
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