The artist is Filonov
Filonov often developed impermanent compositions. He called them “formulas” and sought to invest in them capacious and unusually emotional information. These are his paintings – “Formula of Spring”, “Formula of the Universe”, “Formula of Cosmos”, as well as “Formula of the Revolution”, “Formula for the prosperity. The last stage of communism ”and“ Formula of the Petrograd Proletariat ”, written in the difficult period of the Civil War. These works are built on tense rhythms, crystallization of individual forms, special laying of paints, melting one into another. Such techniques create a feeling of uncontrollability of movement, rapidity of growth, the birth of new structures.
All the art of Filonov lies the mark of the scale of the era, the revolutionary breaking of the old, the participant of which was the artist himself. Time was embodied in the complex symbolism of his works, in the dramatic intonation of the imagination of Filon’s images. Vortex flow of lines and color spots "Formulas of the Petrograd proletariat", In which only individual fragments of reality are identified, associated with the revolution directed into the future by the wind, sweeping the old, breaking the usual foundations of life. However, the picture of the crash is accompanied by the creation of new forms of reality that is not yet clear. Figures of people, animals, surrounding objects dissolve in the general movement of pulsating matter. The main emotional accent in the picture is created by the crushing, repeating images of human faces, which captured different shades of moods and states – they are designed to serve milestones in the development of the main idea embodied in the picture. Filonov’s drawing is like a code that fixes an endless stream of thoughts.
For the first time a picture "Formula of the Petrograd proletariat" was shown at the fifth exhibition "Communities of artists" In Petrograd in 1922. Regarding Filonov’s participation in this exhibition, a newspaper "Petrogradskaya Pravda" wrote: "Filonov is a multilateral and boiling talent [. . .], not an artist of small episodes, but cosmic events".
