Chu Teh-Chun

Canne Enchères, Cannes, 2006

Private collection, France (acquired at the above sale)

Ian Pont, Hélène Jousselin, Chu Teh-Chun, Paris 2000, p.p. 124-125, illustrated in colours

Le son des cuivres II — The title itself is a programme, brass carries warmth and brilliance, but also the weight of metal, something almost telluric. One need only to look at the canvas to grasp the perfect aptness of this designatio; the masses that accumulate in the upper part of the composition, those heavy, rounded forms that the light catches and causes to gleam, irresistibly evoke the metal itself. The way it absorbs and returns light. The palette, ochres, deep reds, muted golds, conjures both the sound of brass and its substance.

Chu Teh-Chun, for whom "to look at a painting is like listening to music" (Chu Teh-Chun, quoted in Pierre-Jean Rémy, Chu Teh-Chun, Éditions de la Différence, p. 33), understood music not as ornament but as cosmology, a way of saying that the forces that animate a canvas and those that make an orchestra resonate are the same.

For Chu Teh-Chun, a title rarely precedes the work: it is the finished canvas that the painter names. The title arising from an experience, an impression, or perhaps a poem (Pierre-Jean Rémy, Chu Teh-Chun, Éditions de la Différence, p. 38). To name this canvas Le son des cuivres II records what the painting has produced of itself; it describes the result that emerged on the canvas after the painting’s conception. Music represented for Chu Teh-Chun "a construction of great suspended impulses or deafening tumult that can set the rhythm of the painter's gesture, animate his breath and be reflected on the canvas" (p. 33). A description that is applied with striking precision to the very dynamic of this composition, where momentum and restraint, tumult and silence, answer one another in a sustained equilibrium. Few works by Chu Teh-Chun distil with such clarity the contradictory forces that govern his pictorial universe.

The format of 130 × 195 centimetres is far from incidental in the economy of Chu Teh-Chun's work. The artist reserved these large dimensions for those moments when the canvas ceases to be an object and becomes a space fully traversed by the body of the viewer. In Le son des cuivres II, this scale allows light to travel, bursting forth as an incandescent centre, fading towards the shadowed edges of the composition. Thus creating an inner circulation not unlike the movement of a musical phrase : its attack, its development, its resolution.

The canvas belongs to a decisive period in the artist's trajectory. Throughout the 1980s, Chu Teh-Chun worked with increasingly large brushes, his marks growing broader and more powerful (Pierre Cabanne, Chu Teh-Chun, Cercle d'Art, Paris, 1993, p. 98). This amplification of gesture allowed the painting to unfold at the scale of the large format. To this evolution was added the enduring influence of the great masters of chiaroscuro. Rembrandt above all revealed to the artist during the tercentenary exhibitions in Amsterdam in 1969, would have "important resonances on his painting" (Chu Teh-Chun, biography, in Chu Teh-Chun, Galerie Enrico Navarra, Paris, 2000, p. 82). In Le son des cuivres II, this influence is legible directly in the construction of light: dense passages of shadow from which luminous focal points seem to emerge.

The composition is dominated by a dark palette traversed by silver-white flashes that burst from the heart of the canvas. Broad passages of paint evoke the atmospheric density of a nocturnal landscape, while nervous marks give rise to a calligraphic tension. For it is from calligraphy that this discipline of the void derives: the calligrapher learns as much to construct the white as to guide the brush, to make the unpainted space a force equal to the mark itself. The areas of restraint one perceives in Le son des cuivres II are not silences within the composition, they are its breath, that gives the brilliance its necessity. It is this dialectic of fullness and void that is named yin and yang in Chinese philosophy. It is within this space between two cultures, two traditions, two ways of hearing the world, that Chu Teh-Chun forged his path with a body of work that is fully his.