In a simple way and always admiring the talent of many other painters, Rembrandt, Vermeer and El Greco are the reference artists for Joaquín Hidalgo (Cantallops, 1928) In his Barcelona and Tossa workshops, taped to the wall, in front of the easels he uses to paint, he has replicas of “El hombre del casco de oro”-of dubious authorship, but a great work- of “La joven de la perla” and of “El caballero de la mano al pecho”. He always sees them, he unconsciously reproduces them, but never imitating them and never in order to analyse them. Why does he do so? I wonder. Well -I think I can answer that-, in order to find himself, to feel the light coming from inside every living being that he places in his paintings as the most precious expression of his intense creative will. Despite his many years as a painter - he began when he was twenty and he has continuously exhibited his works since 1952, when he did it for the first time in the gallery “El jardín”, in Barcelona, this is the first time in the Sala Rusiñol. Thus, even though his signature is one of the most consolidated ones in contemporary Catalan figurative painting, he is a new painter, for a couple of reasons. The first one -and the most accidental one- because he is now among us; secondly, and more importantly, because he is an artist in constant renewal but who never stops being himself. Because at first sight, knowing that a painting is his, as he has managed to consolidate the style that represents him the best. But there is always novelty in a stroke, in a colour, in a background, in a embroidery, in a light coming from the background of the painting we are looking at and that makes it special regarding the other ones, which also offer us their particular characteristics when we come closer to them. Joaquín Hidalgo’s work goes far back, and places us inside the mysteries of human life. It evokes the past, but offers us the present we bear in our respective inner self. He is able to dig into himself and in this way he finds the human sense of beauty that he admires in his trilogy of great masters.