The Synagogue de Delme contemporary art centre is pleased to present Christian Hidaka's first solo exhibition at an art centre in France.

By exploring landscape painting, Christian Hidaka succeeds in renewing a very old genre in a very unique manner. In Delme, he is presenting several facets of the work he has been developing over the past ten years, which combines several motifs: deserts, caves and mountains. These create sprawling, unreal mental labyrinths, in which the eye meanders endlessly.

The breathtaking diversity of pictorial styles and techniques used by Christian Hidaka is the expression of an incredible independence of spirit, an intense, communicative joy of creation that has the power to send us on inner journeys, where painting serves as a passage.

Christian Hidaka's works draw from a thousand different sources. Japanese landscapes, science fiction worlds, psychedelia, surrealism, Renaissance painting... go beyond their apparent antagonisms to construct a representation of the world that has the ring of a promise of reconciliation.

Though his world is sometimes similar to a gentle hallucination, that is likely to make us forget reality, a threat intrudes here and there, like a call to order. The ambiguity of his compositions suggests that landscapes are just as much projections of inner subjectivity as they are places of confrontation, territories overrun by violence, war, conquest and appropriation, ground on which to leave an imprint.

The artist tirelessly observes the signs and marks that cultures sketch on their landscapes as they transform them. What do these signs tell us? What are they traces of? Whether we are roaming nature, walking through shopping centres or wandering around virtual worlds produced by the digital industry, we are given an incalculable number of interweaved cultural forms, codes and stories to glimpse.

Having no horizon or vanishing point, Christian Hidaka's paintings seem like they could go on endlessly, beyond the limits of the canvas, and they speak to us of a world whose non-linear chronology turns in on itself rather than pointing towards a hypothetical end.

Marie Cozette