Pauline Goutain about Slavko Kopac

All manner of species living in nature – whether wild or domesticated, whether exotic or local – found a place in Kopac’s world: deer and boars; flocks of sheep and their dogs; snakes and lizards; dragonflies butterflies, and other insects; birds, horses, monkeys, lions, turtles, wolves. His chosen subjects reveal his great sensitivity to the environment: water flows in his works in the form of springs, ponds, rivers, or a tormented sea. He presented himself as an artist gardener: in La Jungle and Jardin public, he sows seeds of wonder on all types of terrain with a light and poetic hand. One day he confessed: ‘I prefer scrubland to grass’. His creations were swept by the cycle of the seasons, as his series produced in 1966 shows. A single ovoid form combines fall and spring in a colour palette ranging from yellow to blue. On these paintings, two eyes discreetly indicate the connection between human beings and nature. This empathy for the cycle of nature also emerges in Graffiti (1949),which is engraved with the words: ‘Winter without water and without grass is something very sad for the little birds’. Kopac acted as a naturopath. ‘When we look at Kopac’s paintings, we think of spring’, wrote Michel Ragon. And Jean-Jacques Lévęque compared his works to ‘a fabulous garden in which many strange things happen’. 

If Kopac departed from the everyday, from known things, he transformed them to keep his works ‘secret as long as possible and far from [his] daily entanglements with the outside world’. This capacity to extract things from their ordinariness and to project imaginary stories into the material caused Ragon to say that Kopac was a ‘visionary’ and that he was one of the ‘true realists’.

To describe Kopac’s art, Ragon invented the notion of ‘an other figuration’. Michel Tapié spoke of Informal Art. These labels were recontextualised from the 1950s to the 1970s through intense debates around the role of art and its relationship with reality.

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:

https://www.fivecontinentseditions.com/en/p/slavko-kopac/