Underground Shanshui

Reflecting his own intellectual identity, Hidaka’s compositions also express a contemporary global consciousness. Historically unprecedented, his combination of chiaroscuro and obliquely plunging perspective engenders unaccustomed spatial fluidity, but also the strikingly life-like representation of evolving alternative realities. Joining fiction and truth, stillness and movement, history and contemporary issues, the contingent and the absolute, Hidaka’s virtuosity renders opposites codeterminate, equally valid and vivid, one in all and all in one, as Hermes Trismegistus decreed. Darker, uncanny passages nevertheless remind us that, amazed by constellations, we stand on a trapdoor, or on the edge of a precipice. In his studio, however, brush in hand, Hidaka continues to operate a kind of chrysopoeia, transmuting pigments and oil into life-enhancing beauty. Like esoteric memory theatres, his images and cohesively immersive exhibitions are infused with unquantifiable magic that enchants everyday experience and celebrates the infinitely creative potential of human imagination. Hidaka has himself provided what is, no doubt, the best definition of his paintings: “They are an expression of our existence, of our separateness and our need for other people and the world. I hope that, like life, they are endlessly mysterious.”

Thus ends Peter Read’s text for the monographic publication* of Christian Hidaka which accompanies the exhibition. Locations for his personal exhibitions have included the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, South Korea) ; Mnac (Bucharest, Romania) Le Grand Café, Centre d’art contemporain (Saint- Nazaire, France) ; Koffler Center of the Arts (Toronto, Canada) ; Centre d’art contemporain – la Synagogue de Delme (Delme, Franc) ; Le Forum Hermès (Tokyo, Japan) ; MRAC Occitanie (Sérignan, France) ; MAK (Vienna, Austria) ; MUDAM (Luxembourg) and Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt, Germany).

His work is included in the collections of MUDAM Luxembourg) ; Centre national des arts plastiques (Paris) ; Israel Museum (Jerusalem) ; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Frederick R. Weisman Collection (Los Angeles) ; Saatchi Gallery (London) ; UBS Collection (London) ; Goss Michael Foundation Collection (Dallas) ; Scorpio Trust (Geneva) ; Cranford Collection (London); FRAC Corse (Corte); FRAC Pays de la Loire (Carquefou), among others.