Sans titre
Oil on canvas
190 × 570 cm (74 13/16 × 224 7/16 in.)
In the two works presented at Laennec, a collision between colour and movement, pigment and light, fluidity and density, contributes to a metaphysics of space that the visitor senses in these contrasts. It is difficult to distinguish the shades of colour: bluish grey, ochre yellow, warm browns, shaded orange, grey green, silvery black-and-white… Like an alchemist, Wang Yancheng paints “his dream of a landscape” through colour, whose physiological transformations and chromatic consequences on our gaze he explored unrelentingly between 2000 and 2010.
As he says himself, Wang Yancheng “awakens matter”: his gestures are spontaneous; he works the reliefs of mass and the fluidity of colour in great harmony through repeated interventions of the brush which proceed in constructive stages.
If you look closely at Wang Yancheng‘s paintings, which express, in his own words, “his life, his thoughts, his soul,” you can see that the artist has laid down and scratched the material, that he has superimposed layers of colour to accentuate depth, to create the moving space that is characteristic of his paintings. The strokes at work in his paintings bear witness to this ancestral gesture which builds on the spontaneity of Wang Yancheng's calligraphic heritage.
Gilles Deleuze's neologism “chaosmos,” which defined the masterpiece as an intermediate state between undifferentiated chaos and the perfect cosmos, is perhaps the most accurate expression of the blend of turbulence and harmony present in Wang Yancheng's painting.