To write a review of Charles Zuill’s work is, in a sense, the act of reviewing the reviewer. For decades, Zuill has lent his insights on art to readers of The Royal Gazette, essentially defining art criticism in Bermuda.

Perhaps even more impactful is Zuill’s role as a teacher, having taught generations of artists, both here and abroad, the virtues of exploring medium and form. He is part scholar, whose paintings participate in an international dialogue on abstraction, as well as part visionary, approaching painting as a philosopher.

A daunting task to be sure, it was one I appreciated as I entered the current exhibition at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art, Charles Zuill: Portals to Another Dimension, which opened on September 12 and runs until November 4 in the Rick Faries Gallery.

Fortunately, I was armed with the recently released book on Zuill’s venerable career, published by the newly launched Black Pony Press. Together, the book and the exhibit effectively frame the artist’s exploration of experience through abstract forms and textured surfaces.

Portals to Another Dimension is an apt title for the exhibition. Curator Lisa Howie explains: “Each artwork feels like an entry to some alternative space. Each work takes you somewhere else.”

Where the viewer goes, though, is not defined. Instead, Zuill’s abstractions offer nuance and suggestion as a starting point. For the viewer willing to walk through a door left open by Zuill in one of his drawings or sculptures, associations and evocations are numerous.

This is the case with one work, Galaxy (2018), which hangs mid-gallery to anchor the surrounding compositions by virtue of its larger scale. Composed of layered, overlapping white planes turning around a central axis, Galaxy is a formal study of shifting shadows and progression.

In Bermuda, the same type of progression is found on rooftops, especially when condensed in a neighbourhood skyline. Or perhaps Galaxy recalls stairs of white stone leading down a descending pathway, or even a metaphorical descent into aesthetic contemplation.

Galaxy is surrounded by nearly two dozen silverpoints, all from the last two years, a bit unexpected considering the nature of this medium. By all accounts, silverpoint is a delicate and unforgiving process, with marks made only by dragging a silver rod, or stylus, across a primed surface. (Zuill also at times employs a gold stylus, resulting in the introduction of a faint golden hue.)

Monochromatic by necessity, the tones that emerge are gradually built up over the surface. Zuill took up silverpoint during the lockdown, a testament to his protean desire for new artistic challenges.

Over the last five years, he has used this new medium to investigate tonal gradations, a long-running theme in his work. When asked about his frequent return to the use of greyscale, he recalled Sir Francis Bacon’s idea on the requirement of darkness to perceive light, or Goethe, who conceives colour as emerging from the dynamic interaction of light and dark.

Zuill’s intellectual references are not necessary to understand his work; instead, his silverpoints are intuitive and accessible, which has always been the case with his art.

In the gallery, they are unified by a horizontal line created by a divided ultramarine and white wall. The separation evokes a seascape, an appropriate setting for Zuill’s abstractions, which never travel too far from a Bermudian context.

Howie describes the works hung on this wall as “seabound”, and in many cases, this is the first association that comes to mind, as with Silver Sea and Squall (2024). At once minimal and expansive, the silverpoint captures both a visual study and a seaside encounter. It orders a progression of gradients between the edges and the centre. But at the same time, Zuill reveals a quality of light readily familiar to Bermuda.

The subtlety and depth in works like Silver Sea and Squall reveal a common subtext for Zuill’s work of every period. Specifically, he aims to create rather than re-create nature. Paul Klee was an early practitioner of this concept and is Zuill’s primary influence in his investigation of greyscale. Klee is famous for stating in a 1920 essay that art should not “reproduce the visible,” but rather “make visible”. In other words, the artist should seek “the reality behind visible things, thus expressing many other latent realities”.

Rarely does one come across an artist like Zuill whose work conveys such a balance between theoretical inquiry and sensation so consistently. That is not to say that his work is at all repetitive. On the contrary, his work stretches for new solutions in material and technique.

What remains the same is his sincere exploration of the power of form to evoke the spirit of place and experience. In Silver Sea and Squall, for example, the composition evokes Bermuda’s expansive ocean and sky.

At the same time, the exploration of tonal values is essentially a minimalist composition of controlled tones systematically moving from left to right. Even understanding the strict formalism at play, it is impossible to shake Zuill’s sense of place.

The subtle variations cause the light to appear far more organic than constructed. This duality is never hidden, nor esoteric. Instead, it is palpable and accessible.

Another “portal” leading to a similar latent reality opens in his Conoid (2024). Again, it is Zuill’s early interest in Klee — his description of natural and artificial tonal gradients — that 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 maybe the lotus circle, which in the Buddhist tradition represents the path to enlightenment.

Zuill’s circles, in Conoid and throughout the series, do not shy away from such weighty symbolism, but neither are they limited by it. The shifting progress of his marks goes from back to front, from convex to concave, from interior to exterior.

Another influence on Zuill, Josef Albers, similarly investigated the myriad effects possible in the repetition of the square in his Homage to the Square series, done between 1950 and 1976. (Zuill pays homage to this homage in one of his silverpoints called Homage to A Square.) But while Albers investigated colour combinations, the monochromatic range in Zuill’s circles shifts only in the density of the marks to convey tones. Yet, they still evoke a chromatic presence by engaging the viewer’s sensations and experiences.

Like Klee, Albers was a teacher at the Bauhaus Art School before the Second World War and was also the artist-in-residence at the Rochester Institute of Technology when Zuill was finishing his master’s degree there in 1969.

The school’s ethos of the interaction of art and daily life, the application of simple abstraction, and the exploration of materials and processes have 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 exhibit, and indeed throughout Zuill’s career.

Individually and collectively, his work opens doors for the viewer to experience new artistic dimensions, without ever losing touch with Bermuda’s soil.