Bernard Blistène about Slavko Kopac
Slavko Kopac: A Sketch of a Portrait
"But Kopac is elsewhere. I don’t know where. Sometimes on the Italian coast, where he arrived as a student, leaving behind him the dark, future-less world of the dictatorship, to find another; sometimes in Paris, where he found himself again, after a first visit in 1939, to take the place of Michel Tapié, an improbable companion from the Foyer de l’Art Brut, and to share the adventure with Dubuffet until his own death in 1995, some ten years after that of his master. Sometimes alongside Surrealists who had returned from exile, sometimes alongside Alphonse Chave, who, in the mid-1950s, offered him the walls of his gallery in Vence for multiple showings, as a never-failing mentor and friend.
Kopac, no doubt unclassifiable was more surprised than anyone to find himself at the intersection of aesthetic debates of the immediate postwar years. And yet, of course, we must talk about Art Brut and the fascination that Kopac had for its practitioners. Le Brun, Radovan Ivsić’s life partner, talked about this in an interview with Pauline Goutain in 2020: ‘He was fascinated with the purity of their expression – I don’t know how else to say it – which came from the deepest sources of humanity. It was as if, through their works, he witnessed the first outpouring, revealing the bottomless wealth of deprivation.’
Kopac’s ideas about Art Brut – no doubt the ‘quilting point’ of his life and thought, the principle through which he organised his work and his vision – were distinct from Dubuffet’s concept as he implemented and staged the movement after the war. This concept touched on the organisation of mental and social life, in which, as Lacan suggested, belief is defined between imaginary and symbolic, ignorance between real and symbolic, hate between imaginary and real. A ‘power play’, as Freud had said in an earlier time.
From the book accompanying the exhibition Slavko Kopac: The Hidden Treasure. Informal Art, Surrealism, Art Brut. 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2025
Read the full essay in the book available at the link provided below: