Exhibition "Purple and Turquoise — the Art of Painting"

The exhibition “Purple and Turquoise — the Art of Painting” by Predrag Peđa Milošević, an academic painter from Belgrade, was ceremonially opened on 13 July in Pula, in the remarkable space of the Gallery of the Serbian Cultural Centre in Istria. The exhibition is part of the opening programmes of the 64th Pula Film Festival.

The artist Peđa Milošević presented oils on canvas in which, with a refined Fellini-esque palette, he connects two arts — painting and film.

The very name of the exhibition tells us that “Purple” is a symbol of the Sun and of warmth, while “Turquoise” is the colour of the deep sea, revealing the relationship of the artist — who lived for many years in Spain — toward the Mediterranean. Milošević’s painting from the “Purple and Turquoise” cycle is a kind of intimist art of figurative orientation, strongly grounded in the skills and the way of thinking of the old masters of Flemish, Spanish and Venetian painting.

Two days before the festive opening of the Festival in the Arena, before guests from the cultural, social and public life of Pula and Istria, and the many media that follow the festival’s events, the exhibition “Purple and Turquoise — the Art of Painting” was opened by Gordana Restović, director of the Pula Film Festival.

The Serbian Cultural Centre in Istria, Pula, has — since its founding, through exhibitions in its gallery space, for the fourth year running — made a significant contribution to the largest cultural event in Istria, the Pula Film Festival. The exhibition was open until 28 July.

Predrag Peđa Milošević (1960) was born in Zemun and graduated from the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade, in the painting department, in the class of Professor Rajko Nikolić. In the early nineties of the last century he lived and worked in Spain. Over the past few years he has exhibited at more than forty exhibitions at home and abroad.

About this exhibition and his work, Peđa Milošević says:

— My way of visual expression entails a new sensibility presented through the painting techniques of the old masters. For many years I have been researching the mutual influences of the painting of central and northern Europe on the painting of the Mediterranean and vice versa. I discover the significance of that influence and all its layers through the recipes and methods of the old way of painting. There is hardly a significant artist from the North who did not travel to the South: Dürer, Rubens, Goethe, Thomas Mann, Joyce… Contact with the Mediterranean gave new momentum to their creations. In some such way I too try to think and create.

It is not my intention to align myself aesthetically with the anachronists, the painters of memory and the learned painters who, since the nineties of the last century, confirm Baudrillard’s view that in the contemporary age everything is current but also retro. I think that postmodernism is still a valid paradigm that established the equality of all forms of artistic expression.

Through my work I try to answer the question whether, in painting — in a world of mass consumption, in a society of spectacle and devalued privacy — it makes sense to create with the vibrato of subtle emotions, precisely in the manner of the old masters. Leonid Šejka claimed that painting is a complex of knowledge threatened by oblivion. I strive for the very opposite — to support that complex of painterly knowledge.

With this exhibition I re-examine the possibility and the need for the artist to withdraw from mass current influences, by secluding himself in the studio, working on works that are an expression of personality and intimacy. I think that classical painting today is a rarity and that for this reason it represents the avant-garde in art. The aesthetic postulate “it is not what but how that matters” has never been more justified.