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Letter to the editor

Artist takes life at face value

By ALEXANDRA ZAYAS
Published June 8, 2007

He has come a long way to the Oliva Cigar Factory, to the studio filled with his artwork. Fifteen years ago, he almost gave up.

It was in Taos, N.M., when Belgian artist Andre Kupfermunz experienced his drought.

A traveler had knocked on his door one afternoon in 1992, drawn to Kupfermunz's studio by the sculpted faces in his window, all heads with enlarged, distorted, exaggerated features.

The traveler wanted to know more about his strange art, and so they had breakfast the next morning.

The man asked a question: Why did all his artwork look the same? The faces all looked sad, in pain, confused, cynical, resigned.

Kupfermunz couldn't answer. He left breakfast that morning and didn't touch clay for two years.

If I keep repeating myself, he thought, what's the point?

In 1994, something from deep within made him sculpt again. "If that's what I was here to do, then I would do it, " Kupfermunz concluded.

Those faces, he realized, were more than sculptures - they were reflections of him. They poured from his hands as a lingering response to his very first year of life, a time for which he has no memories or words, just the unexplained urge to keep making faces.

The hidden child

The year was 1943. Kupfermunz's mother, Nicole, emerged from a hideout in the mountains of France, where she and her husband, Schal, who were Jewish, fought in the resistance against the German occupation.

She gave birth to Andre in Romans sur Isere, and spent the next six months with him in a room across the street from the Gestapo, passing information to the resistance about the post's comings and goings.

A false bottom on Andre's stroller stored guns and ammunition. False papers declared that he was Catholic. He was even baptized. His godparents were also Jewish, also in hiding, also in possession of false papers. They held onto their roles long after the charade. For years, his godmother would make him latkes on his birthday.

When Andre was weaned off breast milk, his mother hid him with a family in the hills near Florasse, France. He has no memories of what happened at that farm.

When his parents returned for him, he was 18 months old. His legs were misshapen because of a lack of calcium. He was unsupervised in the barn, pushing a pig away to scavenge its potato peels.

Kupfermunz's work taps into the extremes he absorbed at a preverbal time, he said: "everything that has gone into the brain of someone who has no words to express."

Out of hiding

Now 64, Kupfermunz spends much of his time in his rented studio space at the Oliva Cigar Factory in Ybor City, surrounded by the faces he now embraces.

He has a greater understanding of them now than he did when he met the traveler 15 years ago. The faces, he says, are not only a reflection of the past but a message that love and happiness can emerge from the most visceral beginnings. They are a metaphor for his life.

"If I can accept myself the way I am, then I can accept you for the way you are, " he said. "If people could just be with what they are and not block that, that's what I'm standing for."

Other artists are drawn to Kupfermunz's spirit of openness. "When we throw shows, he opens his doors. He wines and dines people, gives them tea, " said Blake Emory, who manages the Oliva Cigar Factory artist colony. He's a "very knowledgeable cultural traveler, a very cool guy to have around."

Kupfermunz has expanded into painting and creating garden sculptures designed to lie flat on the lawn, looking up from the grass. Soon, he will publish a catalog of his garden sculptures.

But the art project he is most excited about will be one in which he won't be the artist. Kupfermunz and his wife, Michelle Passoff, are working with the Child Abuse Council to integrate art into afterschool programs that would allow children to communicate things they may not be able to say.

A September fundraiser will collect art supplies to give to community centers. Artists would watch the children's works to recognize psychological signs of abuse.

Art would give the children, as it gave Kupfermunz, a chance to express themselves even if they don't have the words.

So many children don't report abuse because they don't know what it is, he says.

To recognize it, to communicate it, to unearth something ugly and create something beautiful - that's how they can come out of hiding.

Alexandra Zayas can be reached at 226-3354 or azayas@sptimes.com.

. if you go

Art show

Check out the work of Andre Kupfermunz and the other artists at the Oliva Cigar Factory today, June 15, 22 and 29 at a show called "2012: Montezuma's Last Prophecy." Doors open at 9 p.m. Performance art begins at 10 p.m. The factory is at Palm Avenue and N 18th Street in Ybor City.

To help

If you are an artist interested in contributing to the Child Abuse Council project or want to donate money or art supplies, call Kupfermunz at 598-7254.

Andre Kupfermunz

Age: 64

Digs: West Shore home and Ybor City studio

Gig: Artist, real estate investor

Wife: Michelle Passoff, who wrote the book, LIGHTEN UP! Free Yourself From Clutter, and heads a business by the same name

Renaissance man: Kupfermunz has also served as a topographer in the Belgian army and a foreign commerce facilitator. He has traded dairy products and raised llamas.

Parlez-vous Francais?: Every Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the John F. Germany Library, Kupfermunz leads discussions in French.

[Last modified June 7, 2007, 07:29:38]