Retrospective Exhibition 75 years since the Birth of the Artist

Sent to Varna City Art Gallery for the opening of Alexander Kaprichev exhibition on the occasion of 75 years of the artist's birth.

 

“Alexander Kaprichev is an outstanding phenomenon in Bulgarian culture. An artist of high calibre, Kaprichev has left a lasting legacy in the field of painting. His works impress with their unique beauty, originality of style and spiritual content. All of this makes him a well-deserved representative of Bulgaria on the international scene.   

 

Comment by Penka Kazandzhieiva, History of Art tutor at the Musical Academy, Sofia

 

I am trying to explain to myself the striking presence of perspective and poetics in the works of Alexander Kaprichev. The superimposition of a constant flow of transforming forms, perspectives, imprints from memory, and the unchangeable permanency crystalised into a sign, a symbol, corresponds to the outwardly expressed purposefully intended musicality of his paintings.  

Music cycles and their analogues in the visual arts are particularly evident in the strife towards the representation of the invisible through the visible — for example, the conception of time and that of the unfinished present moment. 

In Paul Klee, the abstract idea and music relate to the temporal, akin to essence of creativity in nature and art. Klee transforms the conductor’s movements into graphic symbols – visually filled with musical content hieroglyphs, from which he produces a series of drawings of boats and ships. The sailing vessels with their masts and ropes symbolise the movement of celestial bodies, whereas the winds and light are a metaphoric representation of temporal existence, a recurring theme in the works of William Turner – a precursor of abstract painting.        

I find meaningful correspondence between the visual aesthetics of Klee and Turner and that of Alexander Kaprichev. The multi-faceted intersection of space and time, constantly moving, like in a musical piece, remain characteristic components of Kaprichev’s art. Thus, it is not coincidental that they dominate his creative process, and that could explain the music resonance in a title of his painting, such as “Composition” where the streaking light and its transparency are overwhelming. They sharpen the ability of the eye to search and seek beyond the visible to find the invisible — sails, nets, bows and arrows, criss-crossing in space, at various distances, before and after the horizon line. A soul-searching experience through art by utilising the inner archive of stored images, sounds, lights, atmospheres, reconnecting with the primal. 

It was the pre-Socratic philosophers who had observed and interpreted nature through the behaviour of the primal four elements (earth, air, fire, water), ‘Stoicheion’, meaning in Greek, any first thing or principle. For example, to Heraclitus, fire was the first principle of the universe, all things were exchanged for fire, whereas to Empedocles, primordial water surrounded the earth in its entirety, stood for the beginning of the creation, and represented a play of forms, time and memory.  Likewise, in the paintings of Alexander Kaprichev the ever-present horizon, as an extreme edge of the surface of the visible touching upon the invisible, in a strife towards the infinite, is instilled with the artist’s ever-lasting aspiration – evocative and timeless.