Local artist Erik Pedersen said his art is about the Caribbean Reef, a place of incredible beauty and danger. "The challenge of my work," he says, "is to make the painful beautiful."

Pedersen is a Caribbean man, a part of the local soil, for which he says he is "blessed."

He is one of two artists represented in a Solitary Artists retrospective of his paintings, collages and drawings from 5:30-8:30 p.m. Friday at the Mango Tango Art Gallery on Raphune Hill. It is Pedersen’s first solo show.

The sculpture of South African artist Mandy Thody will also be showcased.

Pedersen is currently making a significant artistic transition; he has closed his studio. He said Thursday, "Relocating my studio doesn’t mean I am never going to work again; what it means is my work has shifted and I need to give that shift room to happen.

"The new process represents a shift from projects on walls to installations, an entire new art form," Pedersen said.

He charted the evolution of the change in his artistic approach. Pedersen was selected for an artist-in-residence program in 2006 at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, where he was sequestered in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and furnished with a private studio where he created many of the works included in the current show.

"It was in the hills of Virginia that installation art first began to germinate," he said. "That was when it really happened."

That would lead the next year to an exhibit called "Buried Truth," which was shown in 2007 at the "Contemporary Art from the American Caribbean at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts show, "America’s Paradise" and "Isla Del Encanto: Contemporary Art from the American from the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico."

Pedersen is creating elaborate and large installations assembled from found items, painting, paper mache, metal and things he builds. For the past decade or more he has created works that, as a group, reflect the Caribbean coral reef as a symbol of life in the Caribbean.

"The reef," he again emphasized, "is a metaphor for the incredible beauty and incredible danger of life here. It is seductive." The installation, developed and enlarged, was again shown on St. Croix in 2009.

Pedersen reflects his bond with the islands in just about everything he says. "My ideas have grown out of what I feel when I see," he said. He reflected on his immense joy as a child, running through what used to be called the "grass piece," a pasture.

"You discover things in the grass piece," he said. "This is somewhere I’d like to go with environmental art: the execution of things like that become complicated." And they require lots of space. No walls.

He is clearly delighted at the opportunity Mango Tango Art Gallery owner Jane Coombes has given him. "I’m very grateful to Jane," he said.

"I decided to take a break, change a gear on where I want to go. I asked Jane for guidance on what to do with my finished work and she said, ‘Let’s have a show.’"

Pedersen said, "This is my first solo show in all these years. I am letting myself be relieved because the studio involved lots of hardware and furniture, and I’ve dealt with it all."

He said in the 90s he did several Black Rock sketches on St. Kitts. "When I came back," he said, "I developed them into larger works. Jane chose sketches from the sketchbooks, which led to the works on display. This is the first time I’ve seen this done here. I’ve seen it done in the states when a gallery can access these works."

Pedersen is a tall, angular, soft-spoken man, who is almost never seen walking around the island without his classic straw hat, ever aware of his environment – a change in a ray of sun, a small gust of wind.

His artistic ethos is quite simple: "Every artist has a social responsibility; what I try to do is voice the awareness of the incredibly beautiful."