On his young and vital sinusoid, exactly at the point where the power of evermore self-confident mastery of metier began to shake its mane (1968-69), the painting of Kostja Gatnik witnessed the encounter of the subversive impetus of “sixty-eight”, which sparked out of France also over the iron curtain, and the aesthetics of pop art, with Gatnik’s own academic and socialist realism transcending horizons. They both had a great impact on him and that was two-fold: in that special “dissident” tonality provoked by the “demand for changing the old world” and “the need for reaction against serial production and consumerism”, accompanied by grandworld horizons in the circumstances impregnated by the self-governing of socialist Slovenia, and in that characteristic deviation from the original tendencies of both generative movements, fostered by the magnetic field of those same socialist and self-governing conditions.
