Critique by Plamena Dimitrova-Racheva
 2012

For the exhibition at Gallery 8, Varna,

graphic works from Alexander Kaprichev’s collection, created during the period 1996–1997, have been selected, some of which are being shown to the public for the first time, along with three paintings emblematic of the artist’s abstract style.

In this way, a comparison can be made, allowing an understanding of how deeply and professionally the artist comprehended and mastered the expressive means of both graphics and painting.

For Alexander Kaprichev, whose painterly style moves between lyrical abstraction and abstract expressionism, structurally important are those geometric elements that “give meaning” to the symbolism of colour, whether in rhythmically musical harmonies or in the paradoxical sensation of reality beyond it.

The graphic works executed in the techniques of colour etching, aquatint, and colour lithography (techniques preferred by Bulgarian artists of the 1980s, to whose generation the artist belonged) reveal another direction of thinking, one aligned with the specificity of the graphic medium. They bear the marks of a complexly constructed space that gathers different dimensions, within which reality has an illusory image. Time is halted in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the present. The images are torn from a specific place, their connections to reality are severed, and within the pictorial space of the graphic sheet they construct a parallel reality.

And indeed, how more clearly could one associatively visualize “Memory” with the image of “Sea,” “Moon,” “Portrait,” bird, muse, goddess, silence, without neglecting the realistic expressiveness of the line in space and movement?

Along the contours of the figures, the lines seem to flow into one another, taking on the vibrations of invisible movements, resonating with strokes, and passing through transparent colour zones.

The artist wrote in his own hand, “Personality is transient; talent remains,” and we, in our earthly time, have the opportunity to sensorially experience the signs of his talent and life in art as a unification of muses.

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Plamena Dimitrova-Racheva,
art historian
9 April 2012