The New Heritage House galleries on Church Street have opened a show called “L'Art Moderne”.

Quite why the title of the show is in French isn't apparent - the artists are not French - but the content of the show is certainly modern or even “post-modern”, whatever that oxymoron is supposed to imply.

At any rate the artists on display, some of whom are well known and some new, at least to me, range from surrealist to abstractionist and are all distinguished for the painterly qualities that I so often find lacking in such works.

Today young would-be artists are all too often encouraged to express their creative selves without being taught the necessary disciplines or skills with which to do it.

The show starts with four works by a Bermudian artist with the fascinating adoptive name of Chai T. All her works are surreal, a style of painting enjoying a renewed vogue and one admirably suited to the visions induced by deep meditation rooted in Oriental religions as these clearly are.

Ms T's works range from the festive, a dancing elephant surrounded by a halo of floral sunbursts, to the serene, a seated Buddha in a mountainous landscape. Each of the paintings employs a real feather in a corner to signify a separate journey. Each rewards attentive study.

Rochelle Harris, whose work follows, provides the strong contrasts that are part of the reason this show is so rewarding. Her first four works consist of elaborate interlocking patterns, all exactingly executed and colourful. They range from the kaleidoscopic to the sharply contrasting, from colour coordinated to the discordant.

Some are reminiscent of vibrant fabric design, some not. They are followed by two works in a more surreal vein of which I could make little. A friend is prone to say: “There you have it. Make what you will of it.”

This may well be said of the entire show and there is much to be made of all of it.

The eclectic work of the inimitable, unclassifiable Will Collieson, as it always does, elicits friendly laughter and warm sympathy.

Once again I would urge galleries to display sculptures so that viewers can walk all around them. To place a three-dimensional object against a wall is to reduce its impact substantially. This is the unfortunate case with the two Collieson sculptures.

“Head in Repose” is a piece of iron, perhaps recovered from the aftermath of a fire, distorted and damaged. It is powerfully reminiscent of a woman with her head (a ring bolt) on one side, an affecting image enhanced by a necklace formed of a bent, brightly polished, copper nail. The other finds its humour in its title, “Head of the Game”, a block of burned wood (from the same fire?) resembling a bison's head. It is enhanced by a single horn.

The title “High Mass, Low Mass” gives stark humour to an abstract painting of two very secular masses, similarly shaped, one above the other.

Of itself it is an abstract of no great distinction. Given the inimitable twist of sardonic humour that illuminates so much of Collieson's work it takes on a new life. Two other abstracts are somewhat out of Mr. Collieson's usual vein and weren't obviously or even subtly humorous. Both consist of integrated panels in shades of brown, the whole softened by screens of muslin. The effect is certainly pleasing, and contrasts satisfyingly with the other works.

Charles Zuill shows six more of his end-paper style works in various colour schemes.

Whatever you make of them, they are exquisitely rendered with the meticulous care characteristic of all this artist's work. Even more fascinating to me were his other four works.

They were sufficiently three dimensional to qualify as abstract reliefs in the sculptural sense. Three of them have a circular composition reflecting those of his six central works and one a diagonal sweep. Finely detailed and deeply etched, they look almost as if they had been created by a strong magnetic field. Like much of the show, they reward close attention.

Like Will Collieson, Betsy Mulderig never fails to intrigue the viewer with her otherworldly whimsy.

Here are eight of her fanciful works, all so small that they require close inspection and your reading glasses if need be. Each one is informed with its own individual note of appropriate humour and several induced me to laugh aloud. Here, however, the happy two thirds of this show come to an abrupt end.

The third wall of the show contains the works of Vivian Stella-Phillips and Graham Foster and will quickly dispel any euphoric sense of light-heartedness or even jollity you will likely have gained from the preceding artists' work.

Vivian Stella-Phillips starts out with four works in mixed media, predominantly charcoal or chalk, that may be described as either surreal or grotesque in the sense of the Weimar German school of the 20s. The execution is meticulous and detailed, the placing of the subjects in the available space carefully eccentric, and the dislocation of body sections deliberately unnerving.

Ms Stella-Phillips' next five works can only be described as intended ruthlessly to shock. All depict wounds and are not for the squeamish.

The first two are titled “Shrapnel” and are mildly abstracted images of the bloody effect of that foul byproduct of military explosions. As a war protest little could be more brutally effective. The next, titled “Road Rash”, is self-explanatory and equally harshly bloody. The last two, titled “Vagina” and “Surgery” are even more raw and disturbing. I will leave them to the imagination or, better still, a visit to the gallery.

After the gruelling business of studying Ms Stella-Phillips' work the well known dark, phantasmagoric world of Graham Foster comes close to seeming like light relief. Mr. Foster has maintained his own style, perhaps derived a little from the Vorticists of a century ago, but humanised in a dehumanising way and rendered in a gloomy subterranean light that divorces it from any possible sense of reality. This is a world more of nightmares than of dreams, but nonetheless fascinating for that.

The New Heritage House Galleries have mounted a show that is thoughtfully assembled and is indeed both modern and distinguished for the quality of workmanship displayed throughout the show. Whether or not modern works are to your taste, this is a very good show, perceptively hung and well worth visiting for the rare excellence of its execution.