ZHOU SHICHAO IN 2017:
 THE RHYTHMS OF COLOR

Vibration of lines, shapes and colours: we now know the constants, the fidelity and the musicality of the performer who restores on the linen canvas the truth of the sensations and the constant wonder aroused by the subjects of a very acute contemplation of the things of nature and the daily life of men in his country,  China, as well as in France and the United States, current stopovers of major retrospectives. Despite the erasure of the graphic design and the purity of the subject, his attachment to reality remains alive, even if it is up to the observer to recognise the original motif that inspired this or that work. Zhou Shichao (Qingdao, 24 November 1965) has long distanced himself from any explicit figuration in favour of traces and the material that gives life and youth to colour. Even more so in his 2017 paintings, chromaticism acquires a sovereign scope where audacity is not diminished, but internalized and transfigured. Has his art become synthetic, symphonic? Certainly. Just as there are coloured sounds, oil painting has registers that suggest an oboe overture in this work, a cello solo in the other. Pulsations of blues, harmonics of amaranth and burnt sienna, rhythms mixed with Payne's grey and Naples yellow: in his work, music permeates every work he performs in the intimacy of a workshop-laboratory in Jinan. A new language is revealed to us at the same time as a new architecture of colour and forms capable of translating the multiple riches of his intellectual and sensory impressions.

Claude Darras

Martigues, Thursday, August 31, 2017