Zhu Dequn (Chu Teh-Chun)

signed in Chinese and English and dated 99; titled F~{(:~}te Nocturne, signed in Pinyin and English and dated 1999 on the reverse

Francoise Heusser Gallery, Genève

Francoise Heusser Gallery, Genève, July - September 2004

Paris, Moulin de Lambouray, Chu Teh-Chun: Au Coeur de la création, June - September 2004, p. 28, illustrated in color

Chu Teh-Chun’s Composition No. 30 (Fête Nocturne) (1999, [Nocturnal Celebration] Lot 40) shows an artist three and a half decades more experienced and firmly in command of a refined personal vocabulary.  While the boldness of Chu’s earlier gestures remains, the composition as a whole is lighter, less wrought in its surface textures, and less overtly expressive of what once seemed the inner angst shared by a generation of painters.  This later work is a joyous celebration of the act of painting, to which colors from across the spectrum have been invited, as though for a spontaneous bacchanal under a cobalt sky. 

But if the color language, brushstrokes and composition are vivid in their immediacy, the effect stems from an intuition born of extensive creative investigation.  The balance of colors against one another, for example, derives from the juxtaposition of complementaries, which provide the musical colorotura above the dominant pedal point of blues.  Slight strokes of orange at center are activated by the blue expanses, while pure reds (appearing only with blacks) are eschewed in favor of the ‘impure’ complementaries of pinks and teals, which dance across the image and unify the principal floral flourishes with the background tones.