Light in the shadow of Bill Henson's photographs at the AGNSW

SO, the Egyptian priest observed to Herodotus, in your country the water comes out of the sky; in ours, it comes up out of the river in the annual floods.

Bill Henson, from the series Paris Opera Project (1990-91)

SO, the Egyptian priest observed to Herodotus, in your country the water comes out of the sky; in ours, it comes up out of the river in the annual floods.

Perhaps this is the reason the Egyptians imagined the sky as a goddess, Nut, arching over the male earth, Geb, whereas all the other cultures of the Mediterranean spontaneously think of the earth as a mother (Ge or Gaia in Greek), and the sky as a male figure who inseminates her (Ouranos). And no doubt this environmental anomaly and the concomitant peculiarity of Egyptian mythology is related to another phenomenon that struck Herodotus, which was the reversal, in Egypt, of many of the gender roles with which he was familiar.

But the story also reminds us there are lands in which rain is almost non-existent, and consequently where clouds too are virtually unknown. In painting, clouds are naturally more commonly represented in the north of Europe than in the south; clouds generally play a less prominent role in Italian Renaissance art or in the classical landscape than in the landscapes of 17th-century Holland. The flat topography of The Netherlands leads to compositions with a low horizon and vast, cloud-filled skies; and where the classical landscape is concerned with the perennial and cyclical temporality of seasons and times of day, the Dutch landscape is naturally dominated by the inescapable and unpredictable vicissitudes of the weather.

This was the tradition inherited by Constable, but for him as for the later impressionists, the unstable mobility of clouds was of interest in itself, as an image of a new and fluid sense of human experience. At the same time, clouds could have other metaphorical connotations, particularly as the harbingers of storms, among the most powerful metaphors in art and literature. Giorgione's La Tempesta (c. 1508) is the first great modern image of dark and threatening clouds, and there would be many more in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as the romantics became fascinated by the power of nature unleashed in storms at sea or in the mountains.

These are among the traditions and memories whose traces can be discerned in the cloud photographs of Bill Henson - the ostensible subject of an absorbing exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW - but he is also profoundly aware of another set of symbolic meanings, in which clouds are associated with mystical experience, otherwordly visitation, transcendence and epiphany. And clouds are akin also to shadows and darkness, so pervasively employed in the extreme chiaroscuro of Henson's compositions.

Indeed, the small number of pictures in a show titled Cloud Landscapes that are expressly concerned with the physical phenomenon should suggest we are being invited to think more symbolically about the subject of clouds, of what they represent and of what they may conceal from or reveal to us.

The images, selected from several decades of the artist's oeuvre, cover most of his familiar themes, but deliberately present them outside their original series and suggest resonances across the imaginary world that Henson has built up progressively throughout his career, but is here imagined as simultaneous, or perhaps as a puzzle that has finally been assembled and can be looked at as a whole.

The exhibition is the result of a collaboration between Judy Annear, senior curator of photography at the AGNSW, and Henson himself. Annear made the selection and Henson has chosen the hanging - as indeed one can see that he must have, for the rearrangements and juxtapositions are in some cases so bold that a curator would probably feel reticent about taking such liberties with an artist's vision.

One of the appealing things about Henson's work is that one feels oneself immediately in the presence of a mind and an imagination deeply informed by culture, memory and reflection. At the same time, he has an acute sense of the presence and immediacy of human life, and this is why the nude is so important and especially the youthful nude, which suggests life only just coming to full consciousness. Henson likes to juxtapose such figures with symbols of art, culture and civilisation, not only to contrast pre-conscious life with the symbols of elaborate consciousness, but also to suggest unexpected complexities within the former.

One such juxtaposition occupies a short wall of the show. On the left is a reclining nude who might be asleep, exhausted or even dead: even in the gloom, the light picks up just enough details, from her hair to the highlight on the iliac crest of the pelvic girdle, to make her physicality poignant. On the right is an object so darkly lit that we can hardly make it out at first; we see a head and part of a torso in warm light and then, in the shadow, appearing almost disconcertingly, like something glimpsed at night in our peripheral vision, the features of a face. Finally we recognise it as a Roman sarcophagus with a face on the short end and a man reclining on the front, as though at an eternal symposium in the afterlife.

All Henson's photographs are labelled Untitled and differentiated only by the year, or more often the pair of succeeding years, to which the series belongs. In this case an image from 2005-06 has been set beside another from 2007-08. On another wall three pictures have been juxtaposed, a cloudscape and a pond at night, both from 2005-06, on either side of a figure from 2009-10. The figure leans forward, seeming to examine its foot, and is instantly evocative of a picture by Caravaggio of David with the head of Goliath in the Prado, as well as another of the same subject by Orazio Gentileschi - inspired by the Caravaggio - in the Palazzo Spada in Rome.

The angle of the back and the position of the right arm are both from Caravaggio, but the left leg and foot have more in common with the Gentileschi. And oddly enough, for a work inspired by two different paintings, the photograph appears also to have been composed of at least two different negatives, for the anatomy of the left leg is clearly defective at the point of junction with the torso - in the area of the lower belly where a dark curve is like a burn in the image.

This confusing passage coincides suggestively with what would, if the subject were David, be the position of the boy's genitals - except that the model, though ambiguous in the penumbra, was clearly a female one. But most interesting in the present circumstances is the way the framing pictures change the way we read the central one. Musing on this oddly elusive work, we might have thought Henson was changing Caravaggio's David into Guido Reni's Atalanta from the painting of Atalanta and Hippomenes (one of the two versions of which is also in the Prado); but the presence of an adjacent pool of water leads us to think instead of Narcissus contemplating his image while night falls, symbol of death.

Another intriguing pair juxtaposes a boy drinking from a bottle, head thrown back and facing us, from 1997-2000 with a road through a park from 1992. The quasi-narrative connection here is ambiguous, but the figure of the boy, who in attitude recalls such images as Annibale Carracci's early painting of a boy drinking from a glass through which we can see his features, belongs strongly to the early baroque, tenebrist sensibility, even to the way the most conspicuous parts of the anatomy are the clavicle and other bones that make up the shoulder structure - the same ones that are revealed in so many paintings by Caravaggio and his followers.

Particularly complex is the association of images on the longest wall of the exhibition, facing the visitor as we enter. Here two small photographs have been hung on the left, from an uncompleted series begun in 1976, followed by three large photographs, each from different series of more recent times. The first two small works read like the quiet opening to a novel, establishing the scene of the action and introducing the main character. On the left, we see a house in the woods, a shutter open on to a space covered in fallen autumn leaves, disappearing into the forest in the background.

On the right, there is one of his familiar young girls with downcast eyes, lost in a pool of darkness, leaving us to imagine whatever occupies her inner life. In the central picture, much bigger (2009-10), the girl, if she is indeed our protagonist, is reduplicated both as a head in a painting and as that of a visitor to the gallery who is facing towards the camera. The painting is of Rembrandt's Danae, which hangs today in the Hermitage in St Petersburg and is incidentally one of several masterpieces (like the Leonardo cartoon in London) which have had to be radically restored after a drastic act of vandalism - in this case in 1985.

The story of Danae is an erotically charged one that had already inspired several artists before Rembrandt, notably Titian and Correggio - and more recently provided the ostensible subject for Gustav Klimt's image of a woman's sexual reverie. According to the myth, Danae's father had been told that her son was fated to cause his death, so he locked the girl away in a tower where no man could reach her. Zeus, however, desired Danae, entered her chamber and impregnated her in the form of a shower of gold. In Rembrandt's painting, she looks up in surprise and apprehension at the divine manifestation that is about to overwhelm her.

It is here that the hanging of the show is most surprising - one could almost say audacious - in the way the hanging leads the viewer to a quasi-narrative association of pictures into imaginative sequences. It is striking, especially from a distance, that the five pictures on this wall are not all hung on the same line: the last three, in particular, are arranged in an ascending order from left to right, and the sense of upward movement is emphasised by the stretching arm that forms a diagonal in the central picture.

The final one is another cloudscape, a vision of deep and luminous sunset seen through a forest and behind the dark silhouette of a cypress. The rich subdued glow is naturally suggestive of spiritual vision, but in this case, in the context set up by the sequencing of the hang, it is impossible not to interpret it as the golden theophany of Zeus himself, driver of clouds in Homer's epithet and, since the castration and destitution of Ouranos and the fall of Kronos, the new ruler of the heavens.

Bill Henson: Cloud Landscapes, Art Gallery Of NSW, Sydney, until September 22