An Australian living in Spain, Hodgkinson is exhibiting seventeen canvases, most of them large, numbered from seven to twenty-three, all bearing the appellation California, indicating a universality in the artist that is respectably lived up to in the pictures. Hodgkinson’s paint smolders rather than blazes; he favors ochers, umbers and sulfurous reds. There is little or no figuration in the work, but there is a pronounced imagery of a primeval, subterranean nature, linking the pictures to the work of New York artist Paul Jenkins, although there is not the cataclysmic regeneration implicit in the Australian’s pictures, which brood rather than boil. Hodgkinson underpaints—if this is the correct way of putting it—with polyesters, then coats with layers of sand. The technique is not original, but Hodgkinson employs it with the authority of an inventor.

—Larry Rottersman