Hidetaka Suzuki: Hallucinations

Edel Assanti is pleased to present Hallucinations, an online exhibition of eight paintings by Hidetaka Suzuki (b. 1986, Hokkaido, Japan). 

Hidetaka Suzuki’s figurative paintings depict uncanny, transient fragments of everyday life that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction. Luxuriating in their absence of context and thematic dissociation from one another, his paintings are unified by their soft focus and wistful colour palette. Suzuki’s paintings are translated from found online images, rendered in a distinct, horizontally vibrating brushwork that assumes a conceptual effect equivalent to pixels on a screen, drawing our attention to the mediation of his subject matter.

The ongoing series of Untitled (2023) paintings draws their compositions from AI-generated images, an interest that stems from Suzuki’s professional experience working as a programmer. These images are treated with equivalence to his other source imagery, which include crops of intimate anonymous family scenes, still lifes and portraits, further frustrating our ability to differentiate between original and copy, truth and fiction.

Informed by the texture and ephemerality of digital images, Suzuki’s works vacillate between the virtual and the resolutely painterly, addressing technology’s capacity for appropriation with art historical modes of reproduction. Stripped of their contexts and cropped beyond recognition, these scenes are suspended between evocations of a before and after, as though severed from a lost sequence residing in someone’s memory, or on an unidentified hard drive.