The Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art is currently hosting a compelling exhibition featuring the abstract works of Charles Zuill, a prominent figure who has significantly shaped Bermuda's art landscape for decades. The exhibition, titled "Portals to Another Dimension," opened on September 12 and will run through November 4 in the Rick Faries Gallery, showcasing Zuill's exploration of experience through abstract forms and textured surfaces.
Zuill's influence on Bermuda's art scene extends far beyond his own artistic practice. For decades, he has served as an art critic for The Royal Gazette, essentially defining art criticism in Bermuda through his insightful reviews and commentary. Perhaps even more impactful has been his role as an educator, having taught generations of artists both locally and internationally the virtues of exploring medium and form. He represents a unique combination of scholar and visionary, with his paintings participating in international dialogue on abstraction while approaching his craft with a philosopher's perspective.
The exhibition's title proves particularly apt, as curator Lisa Howie explains that each artwork feels like an entry to some alternative space, taking viewers somewhere else entirely. However, where the viewer goes remains undefined, as Zuill's abstractions offer nuance and suggestion as starting points rather than concrete destinations. For those willing to walk through the metaphorical doors left open by Zuill in his drawings and sculptures, associations and evocations prove numerous and deeply personal.
One of the exhibition's anchor pieces, "Galaxy" (2018), hangs mid-gallery and commands attention through its larger scale among the surrounding compositions. Composed of layered, overlapping white planes turning around a central axis, "Galaxy" serves as a formal study of shifting shadows and progression. The work evokes multiple interpretations, from Bermuda's characteristic rooftop progressions found in neighborhood skylines to white stone stairs leading down a descending pathway, or even a metaphorical descent into aesthetic contemplation.
"Galaxy" is surrounded by nearly two dozen silverpoint works, all created within the last two years—a somewhat unexpected development given the demanding nature of this medium. Silverpoint is recognized as a delicate and unforgiving process, requiring artists to make marks only by dragging a silver rod or stylus across a primed surface. Zuill occasionally employs a gold stylus as well, introducing faint golden hues to his otherwise monochromatic palette. The artist took up silverpoint during the pandemic lockdown, demonstrating his continued desire for new artistic challenges even at this stage of his distinguished career.
Over the past five years, Zuill has used this new medium to investigate tonal gradations, a theme that has run consistently through his work. When discussing his frequent return to grayscale palettes, he references intellectual foundations including Sir Francis Bacon's idea about requiring darkness to perceive light, and Goethe's conception of color as emerging from the dynamic interaction of light and dark. However, these intellectual references are not necessary to understand his work, as his silverpoints remain intuitive and accessible—qualities that have always characterized his artistic approach.
The gallery presentation unifies the silverpoint works through a horizontal line created by a divided ultramarine and white wall. This separation evokes a seascape, providing an appropriate setting for Zuill's abstractions, which never stray far from their Bermudian context. Curator Howie describes many of the works hung on this wall as "seabound," and this association comes readily to mind when viewing pieces like "Silver Sea and Squall" (2024). At once minimal and expansive, this silverpoint captures both a visual study and a seaside encounter, ordering a progression of gradients between edges and center while revealing a quality of light readily familiar to Bermuda residents.
The subtlety and depth evident in works like "Silver Sea and Squall" reveal a common foundation underlying Zuill's work across all periods of his career. Specifically, he aims to create rather than recreate nature, following the philosophy of Paul Klee, an early practitioner of this concept who serves as Zuill's primary influence in his investigation of grayscale. Klee famously stated in a 1920 essay that art should not reproduce the visible, but rather make visible—in other words, artists should seek the reality behind visible things, thus expressing many other latent realities.
Rarely does one encounter an artist like Zuill whose work conveys such consistent balance between theoretical inquiry and sensation. This is not to suggest his work is repetitive; on the contrary, his pieces continually stretch toward new solutions in material and technique. What remains constant is his sincere exploration of form's power to evoke the spirit of place and experience. In "Silver Sea and Squall," for example, the composition evokes Bermuda's expansive ocean and sky while simultaneously serving as a minimalist composition of controlled tones systematically moving from left to right.
Another significant work, "Conoid" (2024), opens another portal leading to similar latent realities. Again, Zuill's early interest in Klee—particularly his description of natural and artificial tonal gradients—partially informs this series. But "Conoid" also embodies a spiritual essence resulting from its nuanced simplicity. As a group, the circular forms that dominate the series reach back to Neolithic rock formations or perhaps the lotus circle, which in Buddhist tradition represents the path to enlightenment.
Zuill's circles in "Conoid" and throughout the series neither shy away from such weighty symbolism nor become limited by it. The shifting progress of his marks moves from back to front, from convex to concave, from interior to exterior. Another significant influence on Zuill, Josef Albers, similarly investigated the myriad effects possible through repetition of squares in his "Homage to the Square" series, created between 1950 and 1976. Zuill pays tribute to this influence in one of his silverpoints called "Homage to A Square."
While Albers investigated color combinations, the monochromatic range in Zuill's circles shifts only in mark density to convey tones. Yet they still evoke chromatic presence by engaging viewers' sensations and experiences. Like Klee, Albers taught at the Bauhaus Art School before World War II and later served as artist-in-residence at the Rochester Institute of Technology when Zuill was completing his master's degree there in 1969.
The school's ethos—emphasizing the interaction of art and daily life, the application of simple abstraction, and the exploration of materials and processes—has always motivated Zuill. In turn, he transmitted this approach to Bermuda, where he encouraged generations of artists to discover form. Zuill's silverpoints, or portals, simultaneously embody the island of his youth while participating in well-established international art historical dialogue.
This dance between evocation and formalism, between archetype and immediacy, occurs throughout the current exhibition and indeed throughout Zuill's entire career. The exhibition is complemented by a recently released book on Zuill's venerable career, published by the newly launched Black Pony Press. Together, the book and exhibit effectively frame the artist's lifelong exploration of experience through abstract forms and textured surfaces. Individually and collectively, his works open doors for viewers to experience new artistic dimensions without ever losing touch with Bermuda's distinctive cultural and physical landscape.
