A retrospective: a looking back, something poets from Orpheus to Dylan have cautioned us not to do.

The Koa Art Gallery has thrown caution to the wind, has defied the conventional wisdom and has mounted an invitational show to look back at and commemorate the gallery's 13 years of painting exhibitions.

In large part the exhibition succeeds, not by dwelling on the past but by presenting current work submitted by some of the gallery's 17 most accomplished artists.

The resulting exhibition is a result in equal measure serendipity and solid exhibition craftsmanship.

Chance plays a role as artists were invited to submit works of their own choosing without the filter of a jury.

Miraculously, thanks in great part to a well-designed exhibition, the show is coherent and unified.

On display are accomplished, mostly recent works by Linda Fong, Kloe Sookhee Kang, Jinja Kim, Paul Levitt, Alan Leitner, Brigitta Leitner, Mary Matsuda, Lawrence Maruya, Hiroki Morinoue, Noreen Naughton, Timothy Ojile, Tom Okimoto, Amy Russell, Noe Tanigawa, Lori Uyehara, Helene Wilder and George Woolard. Several pieces stand out as highlights.

Kang's recent oil, "Blind Poems," continues her exploration in paint of simple forms — in this case, tea bowls — rendered in luscious painterly application, grounded in a solid sense of form and color.

A gifted painter, she studied clothing and textile art at Seoul National University in South Korea and painting at the University of Hawai'i and now teaches at Kapi'olani Community College.

Uyehara's mixed-media pieces — part painting, part sculpture — also continue her love affair with wood and demonstrate her concerns about the environment and ecology.

"Woodchips: Up Country" is especially evocative of that uniquely Maui sense of place.

Once again, as in their two-person show at Koa Gallery earlier this year, Matsuda's process-driven canvasses with abstract references to things natural and wild provide an effective counterpoint.

Morinoue offers finely tuned sensibility in works surprising both in terms of chosen medium as well as form.

Stripped to their basics, his cement-slurry-on-wood pieces speak of a stripping away of all that is extraneous, the endgame of a process of distillation and radical simplification.

Naughton's subtly heroic, twisted treescape oils summon up the mystery and power of the forest, Robert Frost's woods, lovely, dark and deep.

Ojile's colorful acrylics and crayon abstracts on paper reveal the only flaw in the exhibition: uneven and spotty lighting that distorts the pieces' design integrity.

Pieces by Tanigawa and Alan Leitner venture into the rarefied media of painting with alkyd, wax and encaustic.

Tanigawa explores the process of painting with molten beeswax, resin and pigments that are fused after application into a continuous layer and fixed to a wood support with heat, resulting in a lustrous, waxy appearance. She also applies gold leaf to her finished pieces.

Encaustic means "to burn in" in Greek and refers to the process of fusing the paint.

Perhaps the best known of all encaustic work are the realistic Fayum funeral portraits painted by Greek painters in Egypt in the early centuries of this era.

Over the intervening centuries, encaustic was overtaken by many other types of paint — tempera, oil and acrylic — each of which was cheaper, faster and easier to work with.

Artists experimented with encaustic in the 18th and 19th centuries, but it wasn't until the 20th century that its use has widely revived.

Modern painters as diverse as Robert Delaunay, Antoine Pevsner, Diego Rivera and Jasper Johns — most famously in his flag series in the 50s — all used encaustic.

Once applied to a surface, encaustic paint cools in minutes, and additional coats can be added almost immediately.

It is a particularly durable paint, because wax is waterproof and over time can retain all the freshness of a newly finished work.

Encaustic can be laid on in delicately thin glazes or super thick, encrusted impastos. It can produce satisfying results whether applied with painstaking precision or with flamboyant spontaneity.

It can be carved, shaped and molded — built to high or low relief, as in Tanigawa's "Possibility" and "Dream."

Leitner's pieces — especially "Flora Emblem No. 30" — suggest a richly textured, layered, almost encaustic feeling within the constraints of an especially narrow color range: anthuriums seen darkly through a sepia mirror, suggesting alchemical transmutation or perhaps hidden teachings of the Kabbalah.

Okimoto's small, Paul Klee-scaled acrylics hold their own as miniature works sometimes do against more monumental pieces.

Jinja Kim and George Woolard's show their recent collaborative mixed-media wood boxes made from material found on their Palolo Valley property, where they have spent the last five years building their home in the lush rainforest at the back of the valley.

Despite its rearview-mirror inspiration, this show intrigues and tantalizes us with what lies ahead in the future for these gifted painters whose current exhibition is as beautiful as Lautréamont's chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.

David C. Farmer holds a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting and drawing and a master's in Asian and Pacific art history from the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.