Double Square 双方藝廊

Double Square Gallery is delighted to announce that after six years, important Taiwanese contemporary artist and educator Chu Teh-I will present his latest solo exhibition, Euphony, Polyphony, at Double Square Gallery, which will run from August 26 to October 7, 2023. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery since his previous solo exhibition in 2017, and will feature more than twenty paintings from the latest series created over the past three years. Continuing his signature creative style, the artist utilizes the characteristics of paint and vibrant colors to create an interplay of virtual and real space informed by elegance and rhythm. Combining rationality and sensibility, his work is the visualization of emotions and rhythm that juxtaposes warmth and coldness.

The exhibition title, Euphony, Polyphony, comes from the brand-new series started by the artist during the pandemic. In recent years, Chu has continuously deepened his painting techniques, and has utilized various media to splash, smear, and polish the paint to extensively experiment the characteristics of paint, creating distinctive painterliness and musicality on canvas. The seemingly random flow of paint is in fact the result of careful construction and arrangement. Underneath the richly colorful and dynamically intense visuality, the layering and overlapping of paint, the fluid temporal order of color, the canvases that are pieced together and extended, the images of Chu’s works engender a sense of time and space, along with the innumerous symphonic chapters constantly bursting and interweaving within this cosmos of form and color.

Over more than four decades, Chu has built a practice that has consistently focused on a dialectic exploration of form and color. Mentored by significant Taiwanese painter Shiy De-Jinn and revered abstract painter Li Chun-Shan, Chu has inherited the spirit of free creation emphasized by Li in his teaching. When studying in France, Chu was also influenced by European painting movements, such as Absolutism, art informel, and Transavanguardia. Over the years, Chu has persistently studied color and paint. Consequently, his work demonstrates an ingenious use of contrasting, complementing, and adjacent colors. He juxtaposes and matches intuitive and sensibility informed flow of colors with unfettered and absolute color blocks in geometric shapes, thus achieving a sense of freedom and stability in the rhythm of the image. His bold approach to mix and layer paint, latex, and blankness, creates a three-dimensional visuality. In recent years, he also deepens the sense of depth in the overall image through arranging and placing differently sized canvases. The result of integrating personal, inner experiences with Eastern and Western cultures, Chu’s abstract painting carries both the dialectics of Western geometric abstraction and the culture of Chinese ink painting, fully manifesting his mastery of color expression and the enriched depth of his painting. The variability and diversity of Chu’s work also show his unending creative energy as well as his exploration of painting that knows no bounds.