The display of paintings, prints and sculpture by Robert Hansen involves us in Robert Hansen involves us in illustrations of a personal, religious mysticism. Figurative white shapes work against a traditional field of black in the lacquered masonite panels, but the visual tools of form and color are here secondary to the artist’s monastic, narrative concern. Along with figuration, Hansen is concerned with an adapted, diluted calligraphy somewhat reminiscent of the early work of Gottlieb and Tomlin. Their symbol-oriented calligraphy, however, wedded itself to a taste for the painted image, absent in Hansen’s shiny lacquer.

The prints are more palatable, perhaps because graphics are more discriminate in form, and allow Hansen’s natural talent for small delicacies to assert itself.

A recent change in imagery gives Hansen’s white shapes a more dominant formal role as they lose their direct figurative references. Moby Dick is a good example.

—Susan Snyder