Roberta Trapani and Pietro Nocita about Slavko Kopac

Slavko Kopac belongs to a constellation of artists who inhabit modernism’s uncharted territories. Painter, sculptor, ceramicist and visual poet, he forged an unclassifiable language from a direct relationship with matter, which he conceived as a living organism. For him, art was never a matter of style but the exercise of a personal freedom embodied in intuition, experimentation and metamorphosis. His work occupies a liminal space at the crossroads of Surrealism, Art Brut and Art Informel, from which he drew stimuli and impetus while developing a body of work that nevertheless resists reduction to any one of those spheres. 

His work can be read in the light of the twentieth century’s major theoretical frameworks: Bataille’s notion of the informe, understood as a principle that destabilises hierarchies of form; the collective unconscious, which in Jungian theory constitutes the archetypal matrix of all images; Lévi-Straussian bricolage, a creative practice fuelled by makeshift means, involving the recombination of heterogeneous materials and symbols; and play, which, according to Huizinga, prefigures and underpins culture, constituting the source of the creative act. The artists’ first retrospective in Italy, Slavko Kopac: The Hidden Treasure marks the artist’s return to Florence, where—amidst the desolation of the postwar period and while befriending figures like Giovanni Colacicchi and Felice Carena—he attended the Accademia di Belle Arti, broadening his intellectual and artistic horizons.

Today the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno welcomes him once more, gathering the threads of a story long relegated to the margins of art’s prevailing historiography. Demonstrating the full complexi ty of Kopac’s oeuvre, The Hidden Treasure conveys its subversive charge in all its undiminished force.

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/