Casey Jex Smith

The contemporary art world isn’t known for embracing religion, but San Francisco–based artist Casey Jex Smith—a devout Mormon—wants you to believe they’re compatible.

Smith’s 11 works on paper feature temples, sheets of flame and billowing waves of biblical proportions, but these signs of his faith are surprisingly unobtrusive. Viewers will be distracted by the artist’s dazzling draftsmanship, vivid color palette and fusion of representation and abstraction—but some odd stylistic moves could fail to convert them completely.

The artist created these pieces with a mix of pen, colored pencil, marker and paint. By leaving large areas of his 40-square-foot drawing Gathering (2006) blank, Smith makes its disparate motifs pop off the paper: intricately rendered waves massing in one corner; covered wagons signifying the Mormons’ westward migration; and glossy, bright-green shrubbery surrounding what seem to be sections of Salt Lake City’s Mormon Tabernacle. Yet Gathering’s overall lack of polish sometimes overwhelms its fine details, a problem that besets most of the works on display.

Smith can layer colored stripes into lovely three-dimensional forms, but the rough swoops of marker in some drawings come off as mere scribbles, and the flat reddish-brown paint engulfing portions of his work looks sloppy. These elements may convey the violence of divine intervention, but harmonious backdrops such as the one in Roar (2008) better suit Smith’s awe-inspiring imagery.