-With simplicity and without ever stop admiring the value of many other painters, Rembrandt, Vermeer and El Greco are the favourite painters of Joaquim Hidalgo (Cantallops, Alt Empordà, 1928). In his Barcelona and Tossa studios, glued to the walls, right in front of the easels he uses to paint, he has reproductions of The man with the golden helmet –dubious authorship but a great work of art- of The girl with the pearl earring and of the Man with his hand on his chest. He constantly watches them, reproduces them without ever trying to copy them and is always analyzing them. Why does he do it? I ask. Because –I think I can answer it – to try to be himself, to feel the light coming from the interior of any living being which he depicts on his paintings as the most prized expression of his deep creative will.
Despite de fact he has been painting for many years –he started when he was twenty years and regularly exhibits since his first exhibition in 1952, at the El Jardín gallery, in Barcelona- he had never been in this Rusiñol Gallery, of Sant Cugat. Although his name can be considered amongst those consolidated within the present Catalan figurative painting, he is a new painter for us, for two reasons: the first and accidental one, because we have him here; the second one, and more transcendental, because he is an artist that constantly renews himself without, however, ceasing to be himself. For, it is easy to say at first sight that a work belongs to him, as he has been able to strengthen the style that represents him best, although we can always spot something new in a stroke, a colour, a background, an embroidery, a light coming from far end of the painting we are looking at, all of them details that make him rather unique when comparing him with other artists, that also present their own peculiarities when examined.
Joaquim Hidalgo's work comes from very far away in time and positions us within the mysteries of human life. He evokes the past, while offering us the present we have in our respective interior. He knows how to look into himself to find the human sense of that beauty he admires in his trilogy of great masters.
Go to the painter's exhibition
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