"Early Italian Renaissance painters believed in a harmony of planes, triangles, and squares. Despite the sacred intensity of their images, they believed in architecture as the ultimate rational confirmation of the miracle. Geometry devoured passion, absorbed it, organized it, transformed it into classic tranquility.

Nowhere is this legacy from art history more apparent than in Robert Hendrickson's exhibit of small Jersey City landscapes at the Rotunda Gallery in City Hall. There are no sacred references in these precise little paintings, but the familiar images (most of which were painted around the artist's studio at 111 First St. in Jersey City) do refer to the rebirth of Downtown Jersey City, particularly the waterfront area.

Streets and buildings, cars parked neatly along the curbs--all painted with a forthright precision that is at once ideal and coldly uninhabitable. Light rains from the sky, lamp posts and trees support it. Streets form a clean organized grid, often painted from a higher vantage point, such as the artist's studio window or a roof top. The empty, garbage-strewn lot across the street is transformed into an eden-like garden of weeds grown into neat rows outlined by clearly defined straight paths.

The Statue of Liberty stands like a beacon behind Ellis Island, no architectural vantage points or atmospheric smog to mark its distance or mar its presence.

These are picture postcards of an unearthly terrain, untouched by the littering, polluting hordes of humanity lurking somewhere beyond the picture plane. Every aspect of urban bliss is recalled in a non-hierarchical detailing of background and subject matter. The surrounding environment is given the same weight and clarity as the central image, be it building or monument."

-Kay Kenny, The Jersey Journal