Critique by Chavdar Popov 
for
National Academy of Arts "AKADEMIA" Gallery 2014

ENERGY SPACES – gallery “ACADEMY” of the National Academy of Fine Arts, Sofia,
12–28 November 2014

Alexander Kaprichev occupies a very specific place in our artistic culture. He could be situated somewhat aside from the mainline trends during the last four decades of the 20th century. At the same time, in his work we can discover all those problems and tendencies that constitute some of the most important – and at that avant-garde – features of the physiognomy of the plastic arts in Bulgaria at the end of the past and the beginning of the present century.

The exhibition at gallery “Academy” of the National Academy of Fine Arts presents works created in England in the period from 1999 to 2006. We can say that this late period of Alexander Kaprichev is also a period of true creative maturity and of full unfolding of his significant potential as an artist.

The large formats reveal simultaneously the assimilation of and the dialogue with the traditions and directions of certain tendencies in modern and contemporary painting. Important are the manifested energies, the impulses of interpenetration and mutual repulsion of the color spots and zones. The pictorial substance seems to materialize before our eyes forces that express in a visually plastic form certain feelings and emotional states, difficult-to-define inner tremors of the soul and hidden internal conflicts. A large part of these paintings represent belt-like, frieze-shaped compositions with active interweaving of verticals and horizontals.

The super-task of Kaprichev is evidently the reaching of maximally expressive color structures. The hand of the artist parallels the naturalness of natural form-creation. In the large cardboards we also see the dominant presence of stripes; the paint is left to flow freely downward. In this way, in the very process of building the pictorial-plastic image, gravitational forces, certain principles and regularities of spontaneous form-formation are integrated.

Remarkable are also the small oil paintings – painted in stripes, combined with figurative elements, which by their improvisational and virtuoso manner of laying on the paint recall Far Eastern calligraphically written hieroglyphs.

The watercolors are lyrical, filled with a soft spreading of the pictorial matter. Here and there spontaneous lines, brush strokes, plastic accents appear. In certain places the artist seems to allow the unevenness, the roughness of the paper, of the sheet on which the watercolor is laid, to “speak” by itself.

Alexander Kaprichev brilliantly demonstrates the infinite expressive possibilities of non-figurativism. The elements of his visual language – the point, the line, the spot, the plane, the form, the color, the texture – in numerous, often unexpected combinations among themselves, create a complex and rich, dense polyphonic orchestration, build a pulsating, dynamic space, incessant metamorphoses of condensation and rarefaction of the pictorial substance.

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Prof. D.Sc. (Art Studies) Chavdar Popov