The sacred and profane mix in Fred Martin's work at the Art Foundry Gallery and in his essay for the catalog accompanying the show. In the essay, Martin posits himself as a romantic in the style of William Blake, tossed on waves of sensuality and spirituality as he creates intuitive, archetypal images.

Martin is the former director of the San Francisco Art Institute and an art critic and cultural historian who has written for Art Forum, Art International and, closer to home, Art Week. His works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

A voluminous writer, he is his own best critic, as is apparent from the highly personal account that he gives of his work in "Four Decades: Fred Martin."

All four decades are commingled in the exhibit – which, purposefully perhaps, has no beginning or end. The earliest works in the show are a series of large, mainly monochromatic, nonobjective abstractions that partake of the "action painting" ethos of abstract expressionism.

Like much work of this sort divorced from time and context, they come off as elegant and decorative. But in their time, they were deeply felt responses to landscape, as is clear from Martin's narrative.

They culminate in "The Rainbow Bridge, Green," an acrylic canvas from 1970 that is a nearly solid sheet of green broken by meandering, flowing lines and patches of orange.

From there, he began producing large pastels and watercolors that seem to well up from his subconscious, filtered through the lens of mystical and paranormal phenomena such as astrology, astral projection and the Tarot. Relying partly on chance, these emotional evocations are partly the result of aleatoric or chance imagemaking.

Of the pastels, Martin writes: "I had … felt the problem was 'orchestration,' namely color – how to make in my visual palette the richness of the auditory palette of a symphony orchestra."

In both the pastels and large watercolors, this effort to get at the richness of pigments and the range of tonalities of an orchestra makes for occasionally incoherent works such as "A Corinthian Capital With Sun and Moon." In others, though, the imagery rising up from a dark backdrop is compelling, as in "A Trip to the Mountains," a watercolor from 1978; and "My Place," a watercolor from 1981 that might have been done as a collaboration between Franz Kline and Mark Rothko.

Many of the works in the show reflect Martin's extensive world travels. "The Golden Wings of Kumaon" refer to eaglelike birds found in India. "The Lyre of Apollo" is a response to Greek myths of the sun god who is also the patron of artists.

His fascination with arcane studies is apparent in mandalalike works such as "The Conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus," 1974, and "From the Tarot, No. 21 the World." Many of Martin's works include fragments of texts taken from his studio notes and injunctions to himself to act now, to be in the moment of the making.

Taken as a whole, the work seems the result of intense spiritual searching that at some times is more fruitful than at others. Many of the most satisfying works in the show are recent pieces, such as the mordant "Another One From Vesalius," 2009, in which anatomy lessons are cut up and rearranged into a collagelike narrative.

That Martin searches in the depths of his unconscious is made manifest in "Self Portrait, or Sea Man," 1978, in which he appears as a creature risen from the sea covered with barnacles and clinging cherubs, the whole rendered in watery tones of blue and black. It seems an apt image for this 40-year retrospective of Martin's work.