Kovacica, a small town in the Banat region in northeastern Serbia, populated mostly by Slovaks and known from the United States to Japan for its naive painting, should soon get an institute for studying local art, and an encyclopedia entitled Slovak naive art in Serbia.

In this unique center of Slovak naive art, the tireless Pavel Babka has been working to promote this form of painting for the past 20 years, organizing exhibits in Pittsburgh, New York, Washington, London, Brussels, Lisbon, Madrid, Geneva, Vienna, Athens and Tokyo.

In an interview for Tanjug, Babka said he would form an institute where ethnologists and art historians will study the naive painting of Vojvodina's Slovaks, and that work is under way on an encyclopedia Slovak naive painting in Serbia, which will be printed in three languages and cover 60 painters.

Half of the articles have already been written and over 1,000 paintings captured, but since the best pieces from Kovacica have been sold to foreigners, there is not enough representative material for some artists, he said.

A print version of the encyclopedia should be completed in three years, which will hopefully open doors of the world's most important galleries and museums to the Slovak naive art community in Kovacica, he said.

The naive painting tradition, which started in Kovacica in the 1930s, has in recent years been faced with the effects of globalization which threaten the authenticity of Slovak art, says Babka, who runs the local gallery.

"This process has already been seen in many indigenous traditional cultures, which, faced with market challenges, became just a folkloric ornament and lost their authenticity," he said.

Babka reminded that painters used to transfer onto the canvass the color pattern which was composed using needle and thread on their traditional costumes, and that a strong color palette was the most important symbol in Slovak naive art.

"Today, the youngest resident of Kovacica who wears the traditional garb every day is 57 years old. There are no more painters who sew and decorate their own clothes, this feeling has been lost in the younger generation. The colors have become darker, and with the disappearance of colors and customs, the strong colors are also disappearing from paintings," Babka noted.

He pointed out that the young people in Kovacica want to do naive painting, because "we try to make it appealing."

"But they would like to do modern naive art, and traditional motifs are disappearing. Eroticism is dominant in the paintings by young artists. They think differently and worry about whether a buyer would like the painting, which is not good," Babka said.