1/4/2024 0 Comments Wolf express wouA unique quest links the women portraits on the 40’s and 50’s to the majestic landscapes of oracular signs from the beginning of the 60’s. It is in this transmutation that works the so personal magic of Zao Wou-Ki’s paintings that make the viewer feel the vibrations of the colors. The canvas becomes the arena of their confrontation, of their energization, of their overflowing to finally reach light. No doubt the revelation of Matisse has first been for him the intuition that painting is not to represent the world but to render it through the colors. Throughout his life, Zao Wou-Ki goes on diversifying his palette, seeking in new tones a more accurate resonance with the vibration of the being. In vivid or light tones, it conquers the painting and structures it with emotions and vibrations, even before he questions the deepness where plans come alive and where the perspective resumes its games. He quite early faces the issue of the color. He tries new techniques, engraving, lithography, makes many encounters, some of them will prove decisive, with Paul Klee’s work during a trip to Switzerland, with Alberto Giacometti, for whom he felt both friendship and admiration, but above all with Henri Michaux. He is anxious, tormented by the loss of many of his bearings, but he does not renounce anything, he goes forward, multiplies works, fills a great number of notebooks during his trips in France and throughout Europe. However our young Chinese painter does not become a French painter. The line becomes thinner, colors soften, shapes also become more precise. He resumes the work he started in China while opening up to new realities. Arriving in Paris and immersed in the post-war creation, he does not allow anyone to impose anything on him. That is why we have wished, for the opening of this Gallery, to focus on friendship. And that is no doubt Zao Wou-Ki’s chance, the mystery of his changeover, in a spirit of reconciliation that enabled him to take and give at the same time. Going from one shore to the other, from the East to the West, it is not to be reborn totally different. There are flashes that last and strike the imagination of a young child. He deeply felt, during the process of unrolling, the emotion in front of the silk which, by successive fragments, unveils itself, with in the end the revealing of the whole work free from its precious silk matrix. More fascination during the annual ceremony of the presentation of the paintings when the scrolls of the ancient masters constituting the family treasure were displayed, such as Mi Fu (1051-1107) or Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322). Through this first mediation, he establishes the link between the visible and invisible sphere. By this daily practice of calligraphy, he gains access to a discovery, a vision and an understanding of the world. ![]() First the heritage of his childhood and of ancient China: with his fascination for the grand-father figure who teaches him how to read and write, linking each sign to its image. His mind is a real field of forces often antagonistic, even contradictory, confronting each other. Zao Wou-Ki, arriving in Europe, does not start from a blank canvas. ![]() ![]() ![]() For many years, I have discussed with Zao Wou-Ki, studied his work, admired his paintings, but I have never been able to penetrate the secret of the voyage that the artist undertook across appearances, across traditions, across life. But most of all, he enjoys immersing himself enthusiastically in this capital, where throng young artists coming from all over the world: Nicolas de Staël, Hans Hartung, Norman Bluhm, Jean-Paul Riopelle or Pierre Soulages.īut there is the mystery of his changeover. His visit to the Louvre Museum, on the very day of his arrival in Paris, testifies of his thirst for discovery, for learning, as does his desire to follow the teaching of the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, under the aegis of Othon Friesz. From far away, he anticipates through magazines, books, postcards, another boiling world behind the ministering figures that already fascinate him: Cezanne, Matisse or Picasso. To choose Paris, for Zao Wou-Ki who does not speak a word of French, is to choose the homeland of arts, it is to decide that he will, now on, only speak one universal language, that of art. It is true that when embarking for France in 1948, Zao Wou-Ki was not only supported by a craving for a new European learning, in the tradition of many of his elders, but above all willing to break with the sterile academicism that still rules China at that time.
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