Art History

For Art Historians, Curators and Collectors

Profoundism is a painterly position developed by Felix Pruner, aimed at restoring compositional complexity within modern painting. At its core lies the conviction that the evolution of painting should not culminate in reduction or decorative simplification, but rather in an intensified density of form, color, and pictorial structure.

The pull, the current. Totality as the interaction of moments: the parts totalize themselves, the totality differentiates itself. The color spectrum, as purely saturated and unsaturated as possible—contrasts. Separate, unmixed. Alongside them, black and white.

But by what means? Not through formal organization, not through pre-formation. The colors are not object-colors, not filler. Abstract painting—but not ideational abstraction. Color as color-intensity, as color-form; thus expression of intensities, of the qualitatively intensive. As for the surface: quantity is also a quality, as Hegel says. In this way the surface itself is transformed; it becomes ground. Only as ground does it enable depth. Surface as qualitative ground makes depth possible. Depth is not a spatial dimension; it is neither foreground, middle ground, nor background. Depth as a field of events.

1.1 Five Theses on Which Profundism Is Based

1. Profundist painting does not exclude pleasing qualities; however, superficial beauty must be subordinated to compositional beauty.

1. There is art, and there is art-market art. Art-market art arises from the perception of market opportunities. Art is autonomous. In this sense, all art is l'art pour l'art.

The purpose of art is art itself. Art-market art has aesthetic-optical perception as its cause—even in cases of supposed negativity or anti-art. Even the negative, the destructive, is calculated for effect. Such art finds its buyers—or it does not. It requires no charitable support. To support it would, conversely, mean affirming art-market art in its mode of production.

Wladimir Weidlé once said that a representational painting in which the subject has become unimportant is already abstract. This standard applies to the paintings by Felix PRUNER exhibited here. Hans Sedlmayr characterized van Gogh as an artist who painted according to his impressions and expressed himself through them. This characterization also applies to Felix PRUNER.

It is therefore not easy to categorize the powerful Bavarian painter whose works you see here: Felix PRUNER is both a representational and an abstract painter in one, an Impressionist and an Expressionist at the same time, a traditionalist and a modernist.