The mostly pastel-on-paper paintings in Abul Hisham’s “Recitation” are full of narratives presented in medias res. On a small, scrubby island in Recitation 3 (all works cited, 2018), a snake coils around a tombstone. Its head disappears into the accordion-pleated murkiness that stands in for both sea and sky; its tail tapers to an elegant figure eight. Recitation 5—A hundred lights depicts the same grave, but water levels have risen, and we seemed to be observing it from the mouth of a cave, behind a screen of incense sticks. The works invoke a pair of eschatological Islamic concepts, the barzakh