Zhou Shichao: Strokes and Colors of 2016

Twenty years have passed since the cardinal period of 1995-1998 when Zhou Shichao (Qingdao, November 24, 1965) initiated a unique and sovereign path, freed from the teachings received and the influences suffered. Twenty years have passed and the analysis of his works has become more complex but no less exhilarating. Still no title in the 2016 oil paintings, no reference to things and places: beyond the forests of Shandong, the shores of the Yellow Sea and the mountains of Zhejiang, the painter's most intimate feelings are painted here. By condensing, sensations and affects merge the pictorial space and the existential landscape, in other words the bias of the subject and that of interiority. In recent years, technical mastery has been more refined in the line, it seems; It has reduced the nervousness of the gesture, softened the marks of the brush, and enhanced the delicacy of the colours. The oil paintings of the last few months bear witness to this. Despite the virtuosity of the exercise, Zhou Shichao shows the same innocence of beginnings and, as every time a painter recovers this freedom, his colours become for the viewer those of the first mornings of the world, roses, opalines, celadon, emerald, amaranth, burnt sienna and turquoise like the lightning that revives them. The extreme simplification of the subject, the refined taste for colour, the craving for chromaticism compose a rare plenitude that links the artist to his Chinese and... Western. There is no doubt that he has retained the atavistic sense of line and colour.

Claude Darras

Martigues, Tuesday, February 28, 2017