Pepe Hidalgo was born in Spain and now resides in Vancouver. He predominantly paints with acrylic and sketches. Hidalgo studied fine arts in Utrecht, Netherlands.
Hidalgo has a distinct element present in his paintings. There is a string or cord that can be seen in the majority of his work. It acts as the umbilical cord that unites him to the universe and allows him to time travel back and forth as it supports his weight and pulls him back into reality. It also takes on the role of identity maker and can almost be considered to replace his signature.
For the Cycle of Life
Pepe Hidalgo 2022
The original idea from which Artist Guo Yan and I started for the 2022 exhibition “Cycle of Life” at Lipont Gallery was related to the cyclical renewal of life in nature. This idea led me to think about human life in its cycle and I took a big leap and started thinking about the cyclical idea of human evolution.
I apologize for it, but I did not want to pass up the opportunity to be able to fictionalize pictorially one of the latest versions of the creation of human beings, I am referring to the translation of the Sumerian tablets prior to the Bible and which in many aspects coincide.
The Sumerian tablets translated by Zecharias Sitchin, tell us the story of some beings from another planet who came to this planet in search of gold and their genetic knowledge was so great that they could modify the DNA in nature. They mixed their DNA with that of beings from Earth, giving rise to humans and other types of creations.
This brought me to the present where our civilization has robotized life, we have genetically transformed part of nature, we are ready to travel to other planets. Every day the news surprises us with advances in surgical robotics, organ transplants from animals to humans, and new information on knowledge of space. Starting from this reality and with these data, I novelize my pictorial history of the Cycle of Life.
Although each painting is independent and makes sense by itself, I designed them so that each one is related to the previous and the following one. All of them form what I have decided to call the pictorial novel of the Cycle of Life. I divided them into triptychs:
The first one represents “Robotization”. The second one is “Genetic Mutation and the Beginning of the Journey into Space”. The third one is the “Visit to a Planet and the Creation of Life”. This is where I introduce a recognition of mythology as a possibility of genetic engineering giving rise to centaurs, minotaurs, satyrs...The fourth one is the “Fall of the Gods and the Walk of Humans in Their Knowledge and Evolution”. After the fourth triptych is where the cycle closes because humans are arriving at the starting point but in a spiral with a higher evolution (more volatile).
