Shawn Huckin’s new exhibition is titled ”Slow Burn,” but the massive fires he depicts on the 15 canvases in the show rage hot and furiously fast. There is a bit of terror in the blazing, orange-red flames and the explosive clouds of smoke that erupt in the background of his wide-angle landscape paintings.
Still, there is a strange beauty to his scenes, as well, and that is what makes them compelling and approachable, and the thing that ought to draw visitors to K Contemporary Gallery in downtown Denver to see them.
The world may be hurtling toward ruin in these vivid scenes of vast, ignited terrains, but it does so theatrically, in living color, and with a flair that elevates the power and glory of nature — even in its most threatening moments — into something that inspires awe in viewers.
That awe is not new to fans of landscape painting, especially here in the West, where 19th-century artists like Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran depicted the rocky hills and open plains, then unspoiled, as places close to heaven itself. These painters exaggerated the might of mountains and the mesmerizing stream of morning sunlight and built up the local geography into something larger than real life, sealing the Westap reputation as a mythological universe at a time in this country’s history when few people had actually seen it.
Huckins, who references Bierstadt directly in this work, repeats this same romanticizing trick, but gives it a dark and ominous edge. And instead of transporting us to a far-off paradise, he brings the heat of the embers to something more like our very own homes.
Here is his device: All of the fires in these scenes are viewed through a frame of hanging curtains, which Huckins paints prominently and realistically along the sides of his canvases. The curtains are open enough, or sufficiently sheer enough, that we can view this action from a safe, personal distance.
These are domestic scenes in which forest fires burn just outside our living room windows. They are perilously close, though not quite consuming our backyards.
In the dry, hot summer of 2026, it goes without saying how urgent these paintings can feel. We are surrounded by forest fires this season, and for weeks now we have seen the sky grow gray and cloudy. We have woken up to the smell of smoke and felt it stuck in our throats and eyes. We have canceled outings and kept our children indoors during the worst of it.
In some works, Huckins gives us only a peek at this impending doom. In the oil painting “First Sun and Glowing Green Curtain,” for example, the curtain is pulled nearly closed, filling the entire six-foot-by-twelve-foot vertical canvas with the fabric’s folds and pleats, which are realistically rendered. There is just a sliver of an exterior view visible, though Huckins lights it up with a thin line of brilliant, swirling yellows, golds and pinks hinting that a colossal blaze is dangerously close.
Other times, he offers a more expansive vista. “Wildfire Sunrise Behind Black Sheer Curtain” lets us see the full sky through the diaphanous veil of a lace curtain. The view is murky with just a dot of a sun — though it glows in an amber shade that tells us the air is full of smoke. These veiled paintings are the best in the exhibition; they show us Huckins’ skill as an exacting painter who knows how to pull out precise detail, while also having the feel of 20th-century abstraction where viewers are only given hints at what they are looking at and need to fill in the narrative themselves.
In every case though, Huckins builds up the drama, even to manipulative extremes. There is a bit of mystery in the paintings where we only get a smidge of fire in the background — what is really going on out there in the backyard, they beg us to ponder.
He also blows his depictions of fire itself to the level of a disaster movie. In some works, like “War Cloud and Floral Blue Curtain,” the flames mushroom into the sky like a nuclear explosion. Itap a power move, but also a bit over-the-top.
Still, that artifice works in that it transforms these fictional fires from something natural and organic into something man-made. In the same way that humans created atomic bombs, we are now — through over-development, dangerous levels of carbon dioxide emissions and profound neglect — turning our forests into incendiary devices that could destroy us in a flash, or at least make this world we live in something less than it has always been. We are not just observers of this movie; we are implicated in the problem at hand.
Huckins makes that real by including in the show’s lineup the painting titled “Among the Sierra Nevada and Green Curtain,” which hangs on a back wall of the gallery and presents a similar scene of the great outdoors viewed through a partially opened, interior curtain. But with this work, there is no fire, just a pristine landscape with mountains and rolling meadows and a waterfall.
This is a much calmer painting than the others in ”Slow Burn,” and the work evokes the pure and optimistic landscapes Bierstadt himself painted, and reminds us of a not-so-long-ago time when the world was less threatened. It makes us nostalgic for the old days (even if Bierstadt made his own fiction) and demands reflection on how we got where we are.
As an exhibit, ”Slow Burn” is an exciting, intense adventure, tempered in the elegance of a controlled, contemporary art space. Rarely is the apocalypse so lovely to look at.
“Slow Burn” continues through Aug. 22 at K Contemporary Gallery, 1412 Wazee St. Itap free. Info at 303-590-9800 or kcontemporaryart.com.
Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver-based freelance writer.
