Painting is back at the Bermuda National Gallery. If you prefer your art to be a little less arcane than the Bacardi Biennial tends to be, then their new show, Marking Territory: A Focus on Bermuda’s Landscape, is a must-see.

The curatorial direction is incisive but doesn’t dominate. Instead it gently nudges the viewer to evaluate the landscape with fresh eyes.

There are twenty-four artists on exhibit, many with large-scale pieces with some first-time exhibitors. While the idea is key to the show’s success, it is the art that speaks and the pursuit of the visually pleasing. That is ultimately what art is about.

A strong example of the show’s intent to challenge our perception is evident in Jon Legere’s ink-on-paper conceptual piece, Banalscape.

The work is comprised of six typed statements individually hung. Statements include, “Volcanic Rock Shoreline”, “Couple Walking On Beach Holding Hands” and “Pink House With Whitewashed Roof”.

The artist’s clever conceit is that each statement cues the mind’s eye to fill the space. The pictures readily appear: so accustomed and hard-wired are we to seeing them.

Ironically, it is the very criticism that has been levelled at conceptual art: a brief description of the “concept” is enough and negates the need to see the work. Here the argument is inverted to satirise the bland, representational “picture perfect” image.

The mesmerising and reposeful time-lapse video by Karl Outerbridge, Morgan’s Cloud, is a view from Abbot’s Cliff. It records the westward moon setting, the flush of colour from rising sun through to the changing cloudscape of compressed time.

It is shown next to Vaughan Evans’s similar setting for his relief print, exhibited previously. The artists have viewed perspective differently. Christina Hutchings has taken a satellite view in her mixed media, Satellite Orbit, emphasising Bermuda as a micro-dot on the planet’s surface. Amy Evan’s zooms in to an arrangement of rocks in mixed media pieces Shoreline After Gonzalo.

Kok Wan Lee exhibits two impressive abstracts. Astwood Park No 3, is a particularly well-balanced piece of warm and cool hues. The artist is in confident mode, using layers of scraped back colour where passages of vibrant red are assuaged by attendant greens.

Jonah Jones’s capacious canvases of limited palette are intriguing because the artist plays with scale. The first of his three pieces, Jonquils Study, is a rhythmic investigation in yellow and an eye-catching start to the exhibition.

We are used to the marine views typical of his oeuvre. But I can’t help seeing boats in the sharp, bow shaped forms of the hedge in Bushy Park No 2, as if they are almost land vessels slipping silently through a mysterious landscape.

He uses low chromatics combined with space to create an uneasy calm: a scene you are drawn to inhabit yet somehow also flee from. The effect is strong but aesthetically, perhaps, less so than his entrance piece. The absence of accompanying text by the side of his paintings hands back discretion to the viewer and these paintings.

The BNG has chosen Sheilagh Head’s abstract oil, Reef Series. Equally, a figurative piece by her could have been chosen: the artist’s styles are not mutually exclusive. Using the same visual language throughout her career, she has the great gift as an artist to produce spontaneous painting of movement and light in both the figurative and abstract. The styles inform each other.

I am not a fan of clothing trees but if Ami Zanders’s “yarn bombing” examples on the boundary of City Hall, Nellie Spins A Yarn, gets people noticing trees then we are well served.

Importantly too, this piece takes the gallery into the people’s territory and a more comfortable place for some; rather than the alien confines of a museum. Similarly, the artist can exhibit outside their traditional territorial domain. It’s a nice touch: the “marking territory” of the show’s title becomes literal. Chris Marson exhibits a view inspired by an airborne GoPro camera and embraces new technology in the digitally manipulated archival print, 50 Metres, Sunrise — a momentous departure from his traditional watercolour work.

James Cooper and Peter Lapsley also exhibit notable pieces. Sharon Wilson uses the encaustic method to great effect in her picture St George’s, as areas of the landscape lose focus and becoming nebulous with a shining Bermuda house at its core.

However, the show’s triumph in its mission lies in the watercolours of Steven Masters. Their sheer power, vision and acute skill are worth the five-dollar admission alone. Before the Storm is a superbly reductive painting. Almost half of the picture consists of nothing — just a bursting white effusion where sea and air clash.

Somehow, he makes the huge void at the heart of a painting meaningful. Weather has often been an important element of landscape art and it is the inspiration here.

Masters’s third painting, The Path — the most striking image of the show — is a menacing, visceral picture on the outer edge of control describing the loss of control. And yet, there is hardly a reference to what would seem identifiable as a Bermuda landscape. Sure, there is the dominant dark toned tree silhouette of non-indigenous Norfolk Pines.

The artist makes paint collide and at times drip yet still maintains order to the chaos. We see landscape consumed by untameable force. Masters pushes his immense ability as well as the medium (he writes in an accompanying statement about “taking risks” in painting). The resultant success is clear. It is the “eyes wide open” picture making the exhibit implores.

Painting outside has only been a relatively modern part of art history. Ready mixed tubed oil paints weren’t invented until a century and a half ago.

It gave artists the accessibility to paint outside away from the studio. Rhona Emmerson is a leading exponent of the en plein air movement on the Island and she is represented here with the rangy cloudscape oil, Watford View, Somerset, Bermuda.

This exhibition is predicated on the idea that modern interpretation of landscape has been formed from the past.

Indeed, Sophie Cressall, the show’s curator, is keen to point out that it has been created with a genuinely respectful nod to the long tradition of landscape painting. Marking Territory is a cultured exhibition of fine perception.

It not only reveals how artists mark their territory but how the territory marks them. Whether it is altered perspectives or challenging the mediums and materials used, it is a show that provokes thought.

The Bermuda National Gallery has sought relevance. They have found it — prepare to adjust your vision.

By the way, this is a perfect time to reacquaint yourself with the varied collections the museum has to offer and the melting pot of major art movements from the Americas, Europe and Africa.

Marking Territory: A Focus on Bermuda’s Landscape runs until May 30.