Provenance:          Gifted to Mr. Neal Prince by one of the Managers, of the Inter-Continental Zagreb Hotel, Yugoslavia

Footnote¹:             As of 1986, the Artist Studio contact information was noted as Kamilo Vujčić, 41000 Zabreb, Dobri dol 54 – Yugoslavia, Tel: (041) 210 537, 229 853

Mr. Kamilo Vujčić (1932 -    ) Croatian (Previously known as Yugoslavia)

If Mr. Kamilo Vujčić had painted in the 1970’s the way he paints today, he would have bewildered the public and critics, and would already have been proclaimed an outcast, a dissident from the native art world. His surrealism, a term we use conditionally, for lack of the more precise one, is utterly distinct from what is only just tolerated in the phantasmagoria of Mijo Kovčić, whose artwork has, in this respect, reached the digressive limits permissible from the verisme of Hlebine. What makes Mr. Vujčić surrealism so distinct and contrary to what was only recently considered the boundary to the realm of the naïve world vision? The distinction between surrealism in naïve art and Mr. Vujčić surrealism is evident at first glance; one cannot help but sense it between the spontaneity with which the naïve painter approaches surrealism and Mr. Vujčić intellectual speculation, the deliberate manner with which, according to the surrealist recipe, brings into conjunction figures and objects that are by the natural order of things impossible to connect, and unpredictable according to the established order. That greatest degree of arbitrariness, which A. Breton emphasized as a crucial postulate, is no so arbitrary in surrealism, or is its sources in automatism. Breton’s brilliant manifestos do confirm this, a scholastic example of rational writing. This arbitrariness is quite deliberate, and artificially connected to spontaneity. It is the much simulated arbitrariness that takes Mr. Vujčić a step further than the surrealists, while naïve painters until now moved on entirely different levels of surrealism.  When Mr. Vujčić interprets his motifs it all begins to make sense, his approach to surrealism is entirely different that that of other naïve artists. Here are some examples: he commented on Willage (1983), a work exhibited at the 19^th Zagreb Salon (1984), as follows: The sub-heading Naïve Art Has a Shadow leaves (naïve art) on its side in time (on a rock); in art… This applies to all the pictures with shadows on stone, plains and so forth, The Help of Spanish Friends (1981) with its subheading Pyramids, the Valley of the Kings. An, intentionally unpleasant author. The Small Door (1985), the cycle Cooperation. Minor, occasional impossibilities. The Arch Second (1986), a second is enough for an accident, but eternity is needed for the city-village problem. Etc. The way is clearly quite speculative in which Mr. Vujčić holds a dialogue with his environment and contemplates his motifs; his vocabulary seems to have come from surrealists. What then makes him a native painter? The fact that he constantly declares himself a naïve-art painter, and that he is continually explaining his place as a painter within the adventures of naïve art are not the deciding factor of his naïve quality. Decisive is his approach to Surrealism, the pure and authentic in his experience of all those zones of systematic determination, acceptance of the ideal as the most serious possibility of our every-day life. Within the surreal order of motifs exists a fear of mysteries typical for the surreal painter; Mr. Vujčić differs from the surreal painter with the simplicity and candor of his story line. He embraces surrealness with a conviction, not as a possible, but as a true reality. He explains each detail, no matter how incomprehensible to us it might seem, as our inescapable reality. He incorporates entirely different and incompatible narrative elements in his story, without losing, in the speculative fabric, his primordial quality, or the spontaneity typical of a naïve painter. Mr. Vujčić is clearly expanding his former concept of the naïve in this recent cycle, introducing new and undreamed of possibilities. Just as is the case, after all, in any art concept, that is, of course, the concept is every original opus.