Takashi Hilferink
Takashi Hilferink’s paintings reflect intersections of his own childhood with the daily realities and emotional metabolism of his family. Delightful and excruciating, tender and fraught – creating and caring for a family involve complex psychic states which ask us to consider the crucial differences between a house (a site, a thing) and a home (a way of life). Much like a house, these works prompt a physical reckoning with materials, while like a home, they filter the abstractions of personal experience. Subjectivity intensifiers and therapeutic containers, these paintings combine elements of perceptual realism and abstraction, highlighting the constructed, plastic nature of reality. They are at once representations of real spaces, and spaces in themselves, sheltering viewers’ meditations.
Hilferink is the son of two former dancers with the National Ballet of Canada. He grew up repairing houses with his father, who is also a master carpenter, and staging homes with his mother, a former realtor. A fraught childhood in Cincinnati, Ohio encouraged Takashi to move to Toronto, where he earned a BFA at York University. It was there he met an artist named Catherine Toth, with whom he partnered and collaborated until her death in 2010. This loss rooted the complexities of memory, longing and convalescence as motivations in his work. Catherine’s ample compassion and work ethic continue to inspire him.
More recently, he completed the MFA program at NSCAD University, where he now works as the Drawing and Painting Technician. His children are two and five years old, and remind him daily that, similar to a model home, a model parent is more likely fantasy than fact.
As a parent of two small children, Takashi Hilferink’s paintings reflect intersections of his own childhood with the daily realities and emotional metabolism of his family. Delightful and excruciating, tender and fraught – creating and caring for a family involve complex psychic states which ask us to consider the crucial differences between a house (a site, a thing) and a home (a way of life). Much like a house, these works prompt a physical reckoning with materials, while like a home, they filter the abstractions of personal experience. Subjectivity intensifiers and therapeutic containers, these paintings combine elements of perceptual realism and abstraction, highlighting the constructed, plastic nature of reality. They are at once representations of real spaces, and spaces in themselves, sheltering viewers’ meditations.
The material and thematic tensions in Takashi’s works reproduce contradictions and paradoxes of parenthood and caregiving. He uses traditional pigments, metal leaf and historical techniques with more contemporary materials, including interference and fluorescent pigments, and prismatic sheeting. In his paintings, luminous buildings and grounds fluoresce beside matte passages of overgrowth. Pearlescent horizons and grey sidings temper richly chromatic energies. At a glance, lustrous surfaces gleam and scintillate; viewed from another angle they withdraw, pallid and mottled. His influences include children’s books and illustrations, Luminism, Studio Ghibli films, MLS listings and retro video games, as well as artists such as Robert Frank and Kawase Hasui.
Creating a family and creating art are both process-based undertakings with manifold personal, political and social implications. Where do these pursuits tend to converge? When do they begin to ask the same questions? To that end, Takashi endeavors to bring the same love and careful attention to his paintings that he does to his family.
