Draft:Jansen Čapar

Jansen Čapar (born November 20, 1958) is known for his paintings, frescoes, sculptures, ceramics, and his teaching work.

Since 1983, through a range of around fifty independent exhibitions, largely in Germany where he lives and works, Čapar has developed his own unique style, a distinctive synthesis of European modernism that evokes traditional Macedonian art. His works can be found in numerous galleries and private collections.

Early life and education
Čapar studied painting at the Pedagogical Academy in Skopje, under the prominent Macedonian modernist artists and professors Borko Lazevski and Dimitar Kondovski. However, Čapar began his studies having already developed an almost entirely clear artistic project. Over the course of several decades, he refined this project terms of content and expanded it in terms of artistic skill and experience.

Čapar began drawing from an early age, instinctively developing the technique of automatic drawing, which was characteristic of surrealism, and drawing on any surface that came his way – from discarded packing paper to his mother's tablecloths – drawing, as a rule, even on the reverse sides of these surfaces. He worked under all conditions – at home, under clear skies, under a tree at night by candlelight, before other children who would pose for him. Čapar's family had a tradition of raising abandoned children, and his mother raised thirty-five children, who became, and remained, part of his "special gang".

Work
Čapar was inspired by associations with his childhood in Nerezi. He has remarked that "our entire world was contained within a circle of three miles: our parents' house, the Vardar River, green treetops, the shouts of children, the fragrant air that comes from the fields, sunsets, and the tremor of colourful flowers". His art is built on memories and calling forth the subconscious. Although he has several recurring dreams (an old clock in a house, in front of which he stands frozen, unable to comprehend that time is passing; the old railroad bridge across the Vardar), when painting dreams he does not copy them, but rather creates them. According to Reinhard Strüber, Jansen Čapar "searches for forms of expression that reflect the supernatural, the inscrutable, the mysterious, and the miraculous, in a whole range that spans from delight to horror. In doing so, he creates a fantastic, bizarrely grotesque world of forms and figures from his childhood experiences, myths and legends, religious rituals, impressions of the local landscape, and Macedonian colours." Every fantasy deforms reality, and in Čapar's artwork from the 1980s and 90s, the depictions of human forms become beastly, and items anthropomorphic. Plants begin to resemble animals, and things bear a semblance to butterflies, insects. In his earlier work, Čapar's unsettling fantasies brought to mind classic Miró art. However, a spiritual affinity could also be found, more on an instinctive than an actual level, with certain works by Chagall, Van Gogh, de Chirico, Picasso, Klee, or in Matisse's bronze sculptures. "In any case," the critic Ive Šimat Banov concludes, "Jansen Čapar's place in the European surrealist melancholy is indisputable. This world remained close to the family of Max Ernst, Fabius von Gugel, or Alberto Trevisan, as well as the world of Wenzel Jamnitzer, of beings that can be found on the borders of human and animal history." One particular cycle, which covers more than a decade (the 1980s to the 1990s) was inspired by Čapar's almost obsessive development of the motifs in Velázquez's mysterious work Las Meninas.

In the twenty years following the 1990s, his central works featured a kind of trademark: dolls/monsters made of cloth and covered with solar and chthonic motifs. The monumental motifs found on the paintings from his earlier creative periods, which were arabesque and decorative, as much as they were solar and chthonic (circles, crosses, spirals, branching and zig-zag lines, dots in various colours, and other signs drawn using a contrasting symmetry onto the surface of his dolls) gained, in these dolls, a pronounced apotropaic character. According to Joško Belamarić: "Although we live in a time full of a range of personal expressionisms, Čapar's world 'from the other side of reality' (and here it would be better to say: 'a world that precedes reality') cannot fail to affect us, but rather reminds us of some murky, ancient states in which consciousness and existence have not yet separated fear from faith, birthing from creating, spectres from people."

Čapar's porcelain sculptures, which were created in the same period, represent something new in the world of modern ceramics. The artist himself explained that "They came about in a truly unusual way. In Stuttgart, there is a ceramics workshop belonging to a well-known German ceramist that was open to everyone. The key was above the door, any anyone who wanted to work with clay could take it and open the door. That's how I too found myself among clay shapes, and the colours of glazes, in making and unmaking. Once more in the game of filling up a true and brilliant emptiness."

Influences and technique
Čapar is a highly educated artist who has formed his views based on philosophic literature ranging from Heidegger to Mahamudra. He addresses questions such as: what is a dream, and what reality? "If I were to try and summarise my artistic style up to now, I would call it – a great mark or seal on emptiness. When you understand the fact that nothing truly exists, that everything is an illusion or empty radiance," Čapar has explained in an interview, "then within the dimensions of this kind of understanding, the world around us and within us is reduced to a goal, an escape from the endless cycle of death and birth. In my work, the seal on emptiness is large, and I see my creative goal as the filling in of empty spaces."

This kind of artistic approach is best reflected in a range of pieces from his current work, which is dominated by "three-dimensional images" made up of threads of delicate lines. The explicit iconographic emblems from Čapar's earlier periods are abstracted, and the organic nature of the composition is enhanced. If the refinement of his style in his early periods brought to mind Oriental arabesques, the subtlety of the lines in his newest compositions has something of the elements of Chinese calligraphy. The tension between Eastern and Western influences has gained new significance.The colourful phantasmagorical world unique to Čapar's surrealism, with figurative forms in ceaseless movement, has transformed to its very roots, remaining in essence the same. A massive opus that is the result of forty years of experience of daily creative work has been translated into lyrical abstraction, in which Čapar wishes, by using minimalistic materials and entirely abandoning the vocabulary of figurativism, to represent through the rhythm of monochrome lines of entirely personal hieroglyphs, as he himself says: "light and dark, the breath of the wind, the hint of movement in the current of a river, and emptiness".

He describes this new technique and skill in his own words: "I have an aversion to reproducing works because they decrease the value of the original. New forms of expression have opened up to me in the concepts of providence, illusion, fragility... Today I paint with syringes, and my paint is a sticky mass and nylon thread. I create the structures of the invisible. Even the Christian liturgy will begin with the suggestion: 'You are invisible, incomprehensible, ineffable'. The Pietà is the most important fresco in the Church of St Panteleimon in my childhood home of Nerezi. This is a kind of precursor to Giotto's painting, because in it, for the first time, the Mother of God is showing emotion. So, I draw lines in a kind of in-between space, aiming to find a third, spiritual dimension. Because we are threads that connect the dead with the unborn."

In the past few years, Čapar has begun collaborating intensively with his son, Jan Čapar, creating dolls and set designs for his animated films, which have received numerous awards at international festivals.