Zhou Shichao's Rejuvenation Bath

The paintings of the year 2023 have the shock power of great revelations: Zhou Shichao (Qingdao, November 24, 1965) delivers the quintessence of his tireless marine explorations. Not the Yellow Sea or the Pacific Ocean, the sea quite simply, the sea that it seems useless to name, to qualify, as in his works, all of which are devoid of titles. An unusual acuity leads him to dissect the thousand and one nuances of marine topography, from the most imperceptible to the most familiar. They are multiple variations with vibrations, sometimes strident, sometimes softened, that he fixes on the canvas and the paper with his brush and his acupuncturist's sensitivity. Here the sound of the waves and the agitation of the water strangely fix the senses and the eye retains the pale sulphur of a flow that releases the reveries. There the foam seems to sparkle with a myriad of flames of a subtle purple purple: it seems as if fish are rolling under and on the shimmering wave of golden waves. There, at sunset, a red lead oxide soon set the waves on fire; As far as the eye can see, the whole sea is blazing, the boats returning to port seem like glowing embers. It is then necessary to seek, at night, lighter impressions in some hidden refuge not far from a shore that oscillates, between ebb and flow, from blue velvet to coppery emerald. The nervousness of the line, the delicacy of the form, the luxuriance of the colour, the musicality of the composition: he manages to immerse us in a bath of youth that will send more than one to the first mornings of childhood. As I detail the recent oils produced in his studio in Jinan, I can't help but think of the very pertinent words of Tian Chuanliu (Taian, 1953). A university professor, the critic and art historian had highlighted his student's gift for simultaneously reproducing the depth of the subject with the tension of his feelings: "With him," he told me during a conversation in Jinan, "composition testifies to the fortunate hold of the imagination on reality. For him, the coexistence of the concrete and the abstract is harmonious and of great interest." The observation testifies to an obvious lucidity and the fruitful companionship of the master and the student. Zhou Shichao hardly ever dwells on the realism or abstraction that is alternately attributed to him. The only thing that counts is the joy of painting, a sort of dilation of the senses, perpetual bliss in short: when one captures joy, everything expands. According to him, the painter, and this is perhaps why his work touches so many people who follow his work, the painter is an awakener who raises the eyes of women and men to a light they did not suspect.

Claude Darras

Carry-le-Rouet, Thursday, November 30, 2023