Regarding canvasses as the pages of a painter’s diary, Zao Wou-Ki uses the date on which they were executed as their title. There is a truly poetic sense emanating from his evocations of subtly lit, “atmospheric” abstract landscapes, about which Henri Michaux once wrote: “revealing while disassembling, breaking the direct line or making it tremble, musing and tracing the detours of the rambling and the spidery scrawl of the dreaming mind, that is what Zao Wou-Ki loves, and suddenly with the same festive air that enlivens Chinese villages and country scenes, the picture appears, quivering joyfully and somewhat comically in an orchard of signs.”
