Tide

Name and beginnings

TIDE is Tatsuhiro Ide, born in 1984 and living and working in Tokyo. The decisive encounter came during a stay in Australia, where he read the manga of Shigeru Mizuki and in particular the Yokai, the ghosts of Japanese folklore; he returned home and began his painting career in Tokyo at the end of the two thousands. For roughly ten years he signed himself in hiragana. He had always written TIDE, a contraction of Tatsuhiro Ide, on the backs of his canvases, and that was the name by which collectors abroad knew him, while the full Japanese form was being misread overseas as Ideta or Tsuhiro. Wanting to work internationally, he adopted TIDE as his working name outright. His first solo exhibition under it, at Gallery Common in Harajuku in Tokyo in 2020, was titled DEBUT and deliberately timed to the change.

The cat

The protagonist is a cartoon cat, usually disgruntled, often installed in a cosy cat bed, and the comparison reviewers reach for is Garfield. What interests the painter is the collision of dimensions. He wanted a flat two dimensional character sitting inside a real three dimensional background, the way old animation cels did, and arrived at the motif by drawing a stuffed cat and then flattening it until it became a character. The surrounding rooms are the opposite: deep, detailed, heaped with cloth, closer to the hand drawn backgrounds of vintage cartoons or the illustrations of a childhood bedtime story. He began in pencil and moved to acrylic because a dense pencil drawing took an unreasonable time even at small size and he wanted scale; the largest picture in DEBUT was his first big canvas. He now combines gestural spray, rough brushwork and soft airbrush sheens, and also makes sculpture in vinyl, ceramic, porcelain and bronze. The palette does not change. As he puts it, he does not think about colour, because he likes to express beautiful silhouettes which become blurred through colour so that the impact fades. Beyond Mizuki he names Roy Lichtenstein and Cy Twombly among his sources, and the recurring subject underneath the cats is childhood: the theme of DEBUT was a memory of four family members asleep side by side.

Reach

Recognition abroad arrived faster than at home and he has watched it with some detachment, saying that he notices he is becoming popular without getting emotional about it, and that he was unsure about what the secondary market was doing to his prices. He has shown in Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, London and New York, taking part in group exhibitions in the last two cities, and he has made three editions with Avant Arte in Amsterdam, all of which sold out.

What reaches the saleroom

Two registers turn up. The paintings are unique and scarce. Below them sit the published editions, and these are what a general sale usually offers. Angry Cat is a five colour screenprint on Somerset satin rag paper, four hundred and fifty millimetres square, hand signed in an edition of fifty, issued by Moosey Art in Norwich at one hundred and fifty pounds and long sold out; the impression LLB Auction sold made a four figure sum in euros, which is a very large multiple of the release price. The sculpture editions behave differently. Night Night in its white version, a bronze finished in automotive paint, numbered from an edition of fifty published by Avant Arte and carrying a moulded signature and number to the underside, made a low four figure sum in dollars at Rago in 2023 against an estimate of three to five thousand dollars, so an edition can also settle below its estimate. For any lot under this name, the things that matter are whether the work is unique or editioned, the presence of the hand signature or the moulded inscription, and documentation from the publisher.