The exhibition of Aleksandar Kaprichev, “Variations”, painting and watercolor, is a continuation of the encounter with the author’s work in recent years. According to Prof. Chavdar Popov, “the artist occupies a very specific place in our artistic culture. He could be situated somewhat aside from the main trends of 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 indeed 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.

Aleksandar Kaprichev works in the field of easel and decorative-monumental painting. He is the author of a large number of paintings, watercolors, graphics and drawings, as well as monumental works, murals, stained glass and tapestries, which stylistically can be related to lyrical abstraction or to abstract expressionism. Aleksandar Kaprichev, however, drawing from the traditions of national and world art, builds his own individual, distinctive style.

Aleksandar Kaprichev brilliantly demonstrates the endless expressive possibilities of non-figurative art. The elements of his visual language – the point, the line, the spot, the plane, the form, the color and the texture – in numerous, often unexpected combinations among themselves, create a complex and rich, densely polyphonic orchestration, building a pulsating, dynamic space, continuous metamorphoses of “condensation” and “rarefaction” of the pictorial substance.”

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“Variations” can be related to the various artistic searches of the author, as well as to the musical variations that are invariably present in his work and reach a culmination through his abstract thinking and visual expression.

For the first time, the viewer has the opportunity to perceive the works dedicated to individual musical compositions through a QR code. An attempt at dialogue between image and sound.

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The art historian Plamena Dimitrova-Racheva comments on the watercolor works of Aleksandar Kaprichev, “shown in the most prestigious exhibitions of the Royal British Society of Painters in Water Colours in London. They are all valuable because in them Sasho Kaprichev preserves the main characteristics of this technique, so delicate in skill, in which the sense of color and the masterful hand are always necessary in order to achieve a complete poetic image of the aesthetic suggestion.

The space in Aleksandar Kaprichev’s watercolors is structured in harmony with purely spiritual parameters. The artist, a hunter of his experiences, captures his artistic visions in the harmony between color, line and the spatial openwork geometry of forms. In the series of watercolors he expresses complex emotional meditative states. In places one can notice esoteric references, which show the author’s characteristic profound knowledge of the semiotics of forms and the color symbolism of modernism from the last decade.

On the other hand, the watercolors of Aleksandar Kaprichev, left without titles by the artist, are filled with the lightness of free improvisation, reminiscent of jazz, of poetry, of ballet – areas of art of which the artist was a good connoisseur and admirer.

The different formats of the works presented in the exhibition introduce additional diversity and a different rhythm of perception. Before some we stop to contemplate them for a long time, others affect us instantly, but all of them visualize the pulsations of the intimate, 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’, emerges the colored aura of lights, shadows and reflections, and thus the abstract world becomes self-named and personal, his own, authorial. The more dynamic compositions encode the expression and inner rhythm of emotion in drawing and color. The lines of the brush move across the vibrating wet surface of the watercolor flows on the soft paper, and leave us to complete them with our own imagination.

Thus, in the world of each of his paintings, while we contemplate them, we are together – we the viewers and the artist – within the abstraction, which affects us with restless thought, modernist sensuality and mastered inspiration.”

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In the words of the artist himself: “an allusion or impression from time experienced, or time in development.”