Before even seeing it, I made a judgment on this show. And I was right. The landscapes that Barkley Hendricks has made are revelatory in ways so precise and disarming that they trained me instantly. An enlarged capacity to respond to them was guaranteed simply by looking.

Eleven of these scenes share a single tight space in the gallery. Not crowded, the varied shapes of the canvases obviously invite congregation, like an assemblage of mezzotints on a Victorian parlor wall. Each tondo and oval and lunette is like a shifting image in a lantern slide show, introducing a distant country to a dazzled audience. artes fine arts magazine

This is Jamaica, but it is also resonant of Vietnam or any colonial landscape with violence just beneath its fantasy of paradise. On one canvas where an unpainted edge reveals the impasto around it, there is a literal equivalent to the many strata of memory that the surfaces of things can keep from us. But the process of exposing this underground is not all the work of nature; Hendricks is reading excavation, and not erosion, in the piece entitled My Back to the Bulldozer. The machine is made visible by the damage it has done. One single gouge of red earth across a wounded field tells the story of every other ravaged ground. A human mark has remade in the earth, and is now remarked by the hand of the painter.

These multiple small panels move the observer from stone to meadow to surf to darkening clouds, all the fragments from which the world is assembled. But each one is as complete in itself, as any of John Constable’s studies for patches of sky. A separate series of larger watercolors achieves a similar effect by different means. In both Turquoise Sky and Three Trees, the thin edge of a verdant horizon forces the eye up to the airy processions that push out over the paper’s end.

Two of Hendricks’ signature full length portraits are hung at either side of the landscape grouping, making a frame out of another of the artist’s visions of the world. Set apart that way, they even more emphatically evoke the tradition which celebrates those figures of self-confident splendor found in the court paintings of Goya and Thomas Lawrence.

There is a further variation on that theme in two large format color photographs (The Twins and Swimming Pool Attendant) which go beyond being a record of a tourist’s encounter – or an anthropologist’s – to measure out the balance of stance and demeanor in the human figure. They are a reminder that the mysteries of affect have long been one of this artist’s central subjects.

Another grouping of work assembles a small constellation of unfamiliar fruits, and although only one of them includes the term ‘erotic’ in its title (and suggested by its framing) all of them are sensually charged, their taste and smell made tactile. But these are not Nature’s version of adult toys. Rather, they might serve as sexual reliquaries or votives – especially where the image is touched with gold leaf – small, but deeply felt prayers of thanks for passion’s gift.

There is thanksgiving, too, in the banana leaves which are both botanical record and exercises in form. That these are domesticated plants is a surprise revealed in the delicate pencil outline of their clay pots.

But for all the varieties of mastery here, the landscapes are what I went to again before I left, making sure of my remembering. There should be room for them in anyone’s memory.

By Stephen Kobasa, Contributing Writer

Barkley L. Hendricks: Some Like it Hot, focuses on the artist’s work created in response to his travels to Jamaica and West Africa. With their compelling scenery and inhabitants, these tropical regions have provided him with a wealth of inspiration, and the resulting photographs and paintings represent a significant portion of his creative output. The exhibition includes large-scale figurative paintings, a series of landscapes on lunette and tondo shaped canvases, renderings in oil and watercolor of fruits and vegetation, and photographs selected from his prolific production in that medium—among them a suite of photographs of activist and Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti  (left) that will be exhibited for the first time.

Now, through December 18, 2011

The William Benton Museum of Art,

University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

860-486-1705

www.thebenton.org