Kent Mitchell Minturn about Slavko Kopac
A Voyage in Informal Art
“It was Kopac who made me understand Art Brut,more than Dubuffet, whose discourse was more intellectual. His words were simple, but his approach wasconceptual. Kopac’s, on the other hand, was sensitive:he used to touch the objects.”
Pierre Maunoury, 1 November 1990
In 1952, Michel Tapié launched the adventure of Un Art autre at Studio Paul Facchetti, 17 rue de Lille, Paris. The exhibition brought together ‘Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, and Wols and featured impastos, imprints, marks, and textures of paint on the canvas, with spontaneous gestures in the form of face-to-face encounters with undetermined, unshaped material’. Also on view were Jean-Paul. Riopelle’s touch, Georges Mathieu’s vehement pictorial gestures, Pierre Soulages’s explosive blacks, the graphic compositions of Camille Bryen and Ruth Francken, Germaine Richier’s sculptures, and more.
Kopac presented his La Grenouille bretonne (1951)., in cement and stones. Among the most prominent artists of his time, he promoted spontaneous art, freed of all assigned or prede termined form, dominated by materiality and creative process. The gesture, the imprint of his hands on the material, imbued his work with an expressionist quality rare in Europe, which Tapié appreciated and which resonated more loudly across the Atlantic. With Un Art autre, vitality was restored to forms. With the expressiveness born of creating with matter, the works regained a sensitivity that the horrors of the war had sought to annihilate. Although La Grenouille bretonne evoked Art Brut, its sources of inspiration were found also among artists exploring new paths of expressiveness through materials. In a way, Kopac was fleeing paint ing to embrace an exploration in which the hand, directly engaged with matter, took over from the mind. This ‘haptic’ approach, as Aloďs Riegl called it, was for him a way of interweaving the visual and the tactile. Jumelles is its quintessence: a thick layer of plaster applied with a knife merges two forms into one, with the goal of offering the eye the power to touch.
Slavko Kopac, La Grenouille bretonne, 1951, cement and stones, 44x38x30 cm
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: