Joseph Kapelyan (b. 1936, Belarus), "Conscience," 1990

Biography
Joseph Kapelyan is an artist of Belarusian origin who currently lives and works in Tel Aviv. Born in 1936, he spent his early years in the war-ravaged Urals. He received his artistic education at the School of Fine Arts in Leningrad, where he studied from 1952 to 1956. Soon after, he was drafted into the army and transferred to Kobrin located in the western part of Belarus. In the early 1960s Kapelyan decided to continue his art education. He received his diploma in Minsk in 1966. During this period he traveled a lot, visiting the Caucasus, Crimea, Kazakhstan and Finland, among others. In 1973 he visited Poland. In the early 1980s, the artist emigrated to Israel, where he took a job as a lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology at Tel-Aviv University.
Kapelyan's art shows a desire to break away from academic restrictions and rigid rules. The artist avoids following trends or artistic schools to which belonging would mean submitting to any rigid rules of logic. He consistently seeks his own individual style. Critics look for a humanistic approach in Kapelyan's art, as the dominant theme of his artistic expression is the state of man in the universe. The landscapes, still lifes, fantastic and mystical paintings that emerge from his brush are metaphorical representations of the desire to experience the deepest human emotions.
Line and geometry are the most important expressive means and compositional elements in the artist's art. It is the lines, which sometimes appear sketchy, that are the purest and most precise manifestations of emotional, intellectual and aesthetic expression. The artist uses the line as a contour, and sometimes to convey movement. This procedure has its origins in his unfettered imagination. It is the strongly drawn contour and geometry that are the elements that unite the works of the 1990s. Through geometric harmony, the artist tells stories about human fate.