Élie Charles Flamand about Slavko Kopac

Mon cher Slavko

Perdre

Mais perdre vraiment

Pour laisser place à la trouvaille

Ces vers d’Apollinaire me viennent en mémoire chaque fois que je contemple l’un de vos tableaux et m’apparaît que le poète d’Alcools eût été l’admirateur de votre œuvre qui, plus que nulle autre, fait appel à la surprise qu’il donnait comme le principal élément de l’art moderne. Si ce ressort, ayant depuis lors trop joué, en est venu à perdre presque toujours de sa force, il n’en va pas de même chez vous, justement parce que vous avez su vous imposer cette ascèse du total dépouillement nécessaire à la trouvaille fusante.

A few regular visitors, like us, of the most brilliant modern audacities, we need, in order to truly penetrate into the world which you give us to see, to practice in our turn a little of that same asceticism, absolutely renouncing dear aesthetics which, without wanting to admit to ourselves, we preserve in order for them to guide us around the pictorial labyrinth of our times.

Slavko Kopac or the regained innocence is the title of the study which I would like to be able to write one day. Both a great connoisseur of the universal artistic production (from the Primitives to the Art Brut) and an expert in all the techniques, even the most heterodox ones, you have followed the path which Kleist showed you in his ‘On the Puppet Theatre’ (and which also was the one Nerval followed, for example), according to which the knowledge which reaches its peak transmutes into a new state, which surpasses it. So, finally, the light of the first day shines. Definitely free from a paralyzing skill, you allow the materials the freedom to express themselves, you capture the unexpected. And it is how, much longer before the present trends vulgarised the use of a found object, you were one of the first ones to “breathe life into a thing which appears to have ceased to exist”, according to your own phrase. The universe which you rule understandably joins the one of the popular Slavic poetry which enriched your childhood, the universe in which the visible is the reflection of the invisible.

Sometimes funny and disturbing, realistic and visionary, your world brings together the extremes and expresses with power the fundamental ambiguity of the Universe. But it always remains bursting with freshness. Thank you, dear friend, for your perpetual invitation to the countries of gnomes and fairy animals.