**CRITIQUE BY PLAMENA DIMITROVA-RACHEVA

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The artist Alexander Kaprichev (1945–2008) left behind a body of work of great scope and significance, including paintings, watercolours, prints, drawings, and projects for monumental works, murals, tapestries, as well as texts containing reflections and insights on life and art. His works, located in Bulgaria and in England, are proof of his indisputable talent. He is, however, among the few Varna artists whose art has still not been researched or chronologically explored. The specific features of his style are yet to be formulated, and the significance of his oeuvre is yet to be fully understood. His unquestionable merits include a profound interest in space, as well as the development of the pictorial and psychological meaning of the basic expressive means of painting form and colour in the spirit of modernism.

Sasho Kaprichev, as we, his friends and colleagues, used to call him, was a direct participant in the aesthetic and conceptual processes innovative for the art of the 1980s, which developed in the studios of the Varna artists located in the former “Vulkan” factory. During that period, the Varna hive of studios had turned into a true legend, a place "an abode" of the free creative spirit of artists.

The structural integrity of Alexander Kaprichev’s pictorial works is built upon the “allusion or impression of lived time or of time in development” (as the artist himself puts it in one of his essayistic texts), yet it has coded points of reference in reality. These are what unlock his imagination and make him extraordinarily sensitive and distinct in relation to the specific artistic task. The artist worked with ease in all genres of easel and decorative-monumental painting. In his compositions—whether abstract-geometric or abstract with figural elements belonging to the associative-metaphorical or abstract-poetic direction—he is capable, in his plastic approach, of achieving both the geometric rigidity of “pictorial surfaces proportioned with squares or rectangles, intersected by numerous slanted and diagonal straight lines” (again according to A. Kaprichev), and the chromatic softness of painting bordering on ethereality, in which “the presence of light is memorable” (once more in the artist’s own words).

Through the complex interplay of colour and form, within the space of his paintings there alternate materially dense, heavy volumes of form, outlined with strong contour, with transparent patches applied delicately, lying like coloured shadows in the whiteness of the canvas or sheet. This renders his work, across its different periods, rich in reflections of postmodernist currents. In the 1980s these reflections are directed mainly toward Cubism and Abstract Expressionism; in the 1990s toward pure abstraction, Constructivism, Suprematism, and poetic reality.

The last ten years of Alexander Kaprichev’s creative work are devoted entirely to abstraction, in which he discovers the space for his experiences. This is the pictorial field of emotions, in which his creative energy and intellect are reflected. In his works he often weaves in the monogram of his name, transforming it into a symbol, combining it with numbers carrying specific numerological meaning. The pictorial space is structured through clear geometry of lines and forms and exists in a sacred symbiosis with colour, the bearer of light.

The overall impression of Alexander Kaprichev’s works is that they are more than abstraction, because they go beyond the formal relationship between colour and form. They reveal their message and prompt us to decipher them verbally or visually, to sense the emotion usually encoded in the title or in the symbolism of signs, forms, and colours. And then, through a contemplative gaze into the paintings, we can touch their deep poetics, perceive—behind the abstraction a richness of thought. This individual strategy of the symbol in resolving plastic problems in Alexander Kaprichev’s work contributes to the dialogue with his art continuing through time.

In the present retrospective exhibition of Alexander Kaprichev, organized at the Art Gallery of the city of Varna on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of his birth, a total of 126 works are presented—paintings, drawings, watercolours, and projects for murals and tapestries. Three of the paintings belong to the collection of the Varna City Art Gallery, while the others have been provided by the artist’s family. In this way, the exhibition offers the rare opportunity to see simultaneously a large number of his works previously unknown to the public.

The exhibition is organized as a chronological excursion through the artist’s entire oeuvre, beginning with his first works after graduating from the Art Academy in Sofia and reaching his mature period and subsequent departure for England (1997–2006). The exhibited works are distinguished by the quality of their colour and their originality. The collection has been assembled from works that remained in his studio at “Vulkan” until its demolition—a tragic event of which, together with his colleagues from the other studios, Alexander Kaprichev also became a victim to one degree or another. Thus, the exhibition appears, in a certain sense, as an organic part of the art created over decades in this unique Art Centre, which unfortunately remains only in our memories and history.

Immediately prior to Alexander Kaprichev’s departure abroad, a solo exhibition of his work was organized at the Art Gallery of the city of Varna in 1996. Although it was well received, in a certain sense the artist was not interpreted in accordance with his specificity and did not receive the recognition that other artists of his generation enjoyed at that time and shortly thereafter.

Alexander Kaprichev had his own position, won through the ability to think, to feel, and to work as a free creator. On the other hand, he was among the few contemporary Bulgarian artists who found the artistic means by which to measure their art against the great European achievements. A significant part of his extensive oeuvre is abroad, predominantly in private collections. What has remained in Bulgaria and can be seen in the exhibition is exceptional for the richness of the plastic problematic of a painterly worldview. There is no imitation or narration in it, but a purely emotional impact, close to that of music and poetry, arts that resonate within the space of the paintings, in a spiritual dimension alongside the visions. This lends his painting a uniquely personal intensity, carrying within it the truths about the principles and meaning of a creatively lived life, filled with turns and with lofty aspirations.

I have known Sasho Kaprichev for many years. I look at his last photograph with the cigar and the slightly ironic smile and I hear his unspoken words that reach us through time from his manuscripts:

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“Most of the things you wrote
Represent
The gaze ‘outward.’
And what will the spirit look into?!
Some kind of smile followed
And the extending of a hand.
I remembered the expression
Of the eyes.
By the fingers of the hand
I judged.”

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Written with respect for the creator,

Plamena Dimitrova-Racheva, art historian at the National Gallery