Pursuing Reflections traces Rick Hidalgo’s artistic evolution from material experimentation to a refined engagement with light and medium. By comparing his works from 2022 to his more recent works in 2024, this exhibition showcases his deepening exploration of reflection, not only as a visual effect but also as a metaphor for transformation, perception, and artistic growth.

Brooklyn (2022), a mixed-media and LED-light, 42 inches in diameter, exemplifies Hidalgo’s earlier explorations with light, texture, and color. The LED light reflects off the muted black surface, suffusing the piece in a soft blue glow that heightens the subtle hues on the ground and contrasts the bright red slashes. Here, we see Hidalgo’s budding fascination with the properties of illumination and reflection, an early stage in what would become a deeper material inquiry.

That curiosity finds its full realization in Ancestral Ring (2024), encaustic, polymer acrylic, and glass on wood, 12 x 12 inches. Light reflects off the dark sea of acrylic polymer, creating an ocean constructed of reflections. At the center of the piece rests a glass orb, returning the viewer’s image back to them and transporting them into the work’s shifting field of light. In this act of reflection, both literal and conceptual, Hidalgo situates the viewer within the evolving language of his practice: a meditation on perception, material transformation, and the luminous thresholds between self and surface.

Through the works featured in this show, Hidalgo reveals a growing attunement to light as both medium and metaphor. Pursuing Reflections becomes a study of transformation. How light, material, and self intertwine in the artist’s continual pursuit of clarity and renewal.

- Curated by Phoebe Caswell