Somewhere behind this burning industrial sky stands Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed: the discovery that the modern world is best seen wet, fast, and half-dissolved. Hido updates the formula from the driver’s seat. A refinery, or something equally devoted to smoke, silhouettes itself against a sunset gone the color of apricot flesh; plumes drift across the orange like slow black weather of their own; and the frame’s left side streaks diagonally, yellow lights pulled into dashes by speed or snowmelt on the glass.
In the classic industrial sublime, Charles Sheeler’s for instance, the machinery stood immaculate and the light behaved. Here nothing behaves. A flare burns partway up one stack like a pilot light for the end of the world; utility poles file along the road as if everything were normal, which, appallingly, it is. Somebody drives past this every evening at quitting time and has stopped seeing it. It would be easy to call the scene hellish, except that hell was never this good with color, and never this calm.
Hido made his name with suburban houses glowing at night, work now in SFMOMA, the Getty, and the Whitney, but his road pictures, shot through whatever the windshield is doing, look at America from just outside it. The archival pigment print holds the difficult end of the palette, those grays that are almost green, the orange that never quite tips into red. Turner, who supposedly had himself lashed to a mast in a storm, would have approved: stay in the moving thing, keep the glass dirty, let the world do the painting.
Somewhere behind this burning industrial sky stands Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed: the discovery that the modern world is best seen wet, fast, and half-dissolved. Hido updates the formula from the driver’s seat. A refinery, or something equally devoted to smoke, silhouettes itself against a sunset gone the color of apricot flesh; plumes drift across the orange like slow black weather of their own; and the frame’s left side streaks diagonally, yellow lights pulled into dashes by speed or snowmelt on the glass.
In the classic industrial sublime, Charles Sheeler’s for instance, the machinery stood immaculate and the light behaved. Here nothing behaves. A flare burns partway up one stack like a pilot light for the end of the world; utility poles file along the road as if everything were normal, which, appallingly, it is. Somebody drives past this every evening at quitting time and has stopped seeing it. It would be easy to call the scene hellish, except that hell was never this good with color, and never this calm.
Hido made his name with suburban houses glowing at night, work now in SFMOMA, the Getty, and the Whitney, but his road pictures, shot through whatever the windshield is doing, look at America from just outside it. The archival pigment print holds the difficult end of the palette, those grays that are almost green, the orange that never quite tips into red. Turner, who supposedly had himself lashed to a mast in a storm, would have approved: stay in the moving thing, keep the glass dirty, let the world do the painting.