STATEMENT

Free and unfettered, hard to pin down, wholly guileless — Masaaki Hikida feels toward cats something like a longing, as beings entirely unlike himself. His cats are completed through repeated trial and pursuit, in an effort to come close to that quality. Deformed and characterised cats have appeared in numbers on the art market, but these works press toward the appeal of the cat itself and keep an unspoiled, dignified wildness. Cats have been painted by many masters — Tsuguharu Foujita, Shunso Hishida, Leonardo da Vinci — and among them Hikida's cats seem to us to give off an appeal of their own. By contrast, his female figures are painted at a certain distance, without pursuing texture too far. He has a sense for making a work hold together with precision, not depending too much on a particular sitter, through a gesture or an atmosphere, carrying a symbolic quality as well.