Critique by Plamena Dimitrova-Racheva
 2011

Exhibition
Watercolours by Alexander Kaprichev
Presented at Gallery 8, Varna
1–30 April 2011

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Following the two major exhibitions in 2010—the retrospective at the Varna City Art Gallery and the exhibition Colourful Scores for Pictorial Worlds at Sredets Gallery of the Ministry of Culture in Sofia—this is the third exhibition in which art connoisseurs can see previously unknown, carefully selected works by Alexander Kaprichev, unpredictable throughout his entire creative path. The intimate exhibition space of the gallery is filled with the impact of the artist’s abstract watercolours, varying in size. They were created in the United Kingdom during the years 1999–2000, when he had the opportunity to work within the atmosphere of artistic centres with studios in Leicester and Birmingham.

Built upon the allusion or impression of lived time and time in development (in the artist’s own words), the space in Alexander Kaprichev’s watercolours is structured in harmony with purely spiritual parameters. The artist, a hunter of his own experiences, captures his artistic visions in the harmony between colour, line, and the spatial openwork geometry of forms. In the series of watercolours, he expresses complex emotional and meditative states. In places, esoteric references can be discerned, revealing the author’s characteristic cultural depth and his profound knowledge of the semiotics of form and the colour symbolism of modernism from the last decade.

Alexander Kaprichev’s watercolours, on the other hand, left untitled by the artist, are imbued with the lightness of free improvisation, reminiscent of jazz, poetry, and ballet—fields of art of which the artist was a knowledgeable connoisseur and admirer.

The different formats of the works presented in the exhibition add further diversity and a different rhythm of perception. Before some of them we pause to contemplate them at length; others affect us instantly, yet all of them visualize the pulsations of the intimate but universally valid experience of the artist.

The pictorial field of his abstractions is saturated with the charm of craftsmanship and meaningfulness. There, around the letter initials of his signature, AKapri, the coloured aura of lights, shadows, and reflections emerges, and thus the abstract world becomes self-named and personal—his own, authorial. The more dynamic compositions encode expression and the inner rhythm of emotion in drawing and colour.

Among the selected watercolour works from his English period are some that were shown in the most prestigious exhibitions of the Royal Watercolour Society in London. All of them are valuable, because in them Sasho Kaprichev preserves the essential characteristics of this technique, so subtle in skill, in which a sense of colour and a masterful hand are always necessary in order to achieve a complete poetic image of aesthetic expression. The artist further enriches the painterly material of his works by placing accents in copper, gold, and silver bronze, and in places densifies the coloured stroke with the bright hues of acrylic paints. The lines of his brush move across the vibrating wet surface of the watercolour washes on soft paper and leave us to complete, with our own imagination, what the imagination suggests. Thus, in the world of each of his paintings, as we contemplate them, we are together—the viewers and the artist—within the abstraction that affects us with restless thought, modernist sensibility, and mastered inspiration.

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Plamena Dimitrova-Racheva,
art historian