There’s no shortage of books and films about the Holocaust, one of the 20th century’s defining events. But look for paintings of it, and there isn’t much.

Yishai Jusidman, a Mexican artist of Jewish descent, writes that painters have struggled more than those in other arts to portray the Nazi genocide.

“While painting has long been an eloquent mediator in our exchanges with death … the near total omission of the Holocaust in post-war painting may be read as a sign of respectful trepidation before too compelling a subject,” he contends.

Jusidman took on this problem in a series of paintings now on view at the University of Connecticut. The exhibition offers a disquieting experience of contemplation.

“Prussian Blue” does not depict the mass murder itself, and not a single human figure appears. Instead, the focus is on architectural details of the death camps and, in some cases, surrounding landscapes.

If that seems like tiptoeing around a delicate topic, Jusidman employs a curious device to move past the “respectful trepidation” of his peers: a dominant color, from which the exhibition takes its name.

Prussian blue was the first modern synthetic pigment, developed in the 18th century and widely used in paints. Through an accident of history, it is chemically identical to stains left on the walls of the death chambers through a reaction of brick and mortar with Zyklon-B, the poison gas the Nazis used to kill their victims.

Thus Jusidman’s ghostly scenes of abandoned crematoriums, which might be merely unsettling, are instead infused with the murderous activity they evoke.

The idea is to push the boundaries of how visual imagery conveys the horror of this difficult subject and to confront the moral dilemma of representing it.

Prussian blue paint is one of three coloring materials the artist confined himself to. The others are pumice, an ingredient in Zyklon-B; and flesh-colored paints, which represent the millions killed, Jusidman writes in the exhibition’s catalogue. The three substances “each have a direct, non-metaphorical relationship to the genocide.”

The blue cast of the paintings, all acrylics, may be more effective at creating a mood than making a statement. An air of mystery and menace can be felt in the monochromatic details of a door at Mauthausen, a concentration camp in Austria. The tiled floor and pipe fixtures on the wall are chilling in their ordinariness.

Likewise, a pile of ashes at Treblinka, one of the deadliest extermination camps, somehow feels even more sinister through the pale shade in which it’s rendered.

For some reason the color’s effect on landscapes is particularly effective. A quarry at Mauthausen could be a standard nature scene if done with realistic hues. Instead, the feeling of something dreadfully wrong is almost palpable.

If the trees in this view are appalled bystanders, in a different scene they are almost complicit in the evil. A painting of a recent-growth forest shows the site of Sobibor in occupied Poland, one of three camps built to implement the Final Solution. After a prisoner revolt and mass escape in 1943, the Nazis bulldozed the camp and planted pine trees to conceal their crimes from the advancing Soviet army.

A third landscape suggests the Nazi project’s ultimate doom. At the site of Dachau in Germany, the remains of a concrete platform stand against a forested backdrop. The left side of the structure is intact, but at right it gradually breaks apart and crumbles into nothingness.

The exhibition spans three locations on the Storrs campus: the Williams Benton Museum of Art, the Contemporary Art Galleries and the Dodd Center for Human Rights. The last is named for Thomas J. Dodd, a U.S. senator who had prosecuted Nazi war crimes at the Nuremberg trials.

The show inaugurates the “Nuremberg-ICTY Archives Initiative,” which invites artists to create contemporary responses to UConn’s holdings on the subject, according to a news release.

Is a color, even one with strong associations, enough to convey the depths of a subject Jusidman chose not to portray explicitly?

“There are colors whose historical implications overpower their symbolic connotations and their formal or optical potential,” art critic Cuauhtémoc Medina writes in the catalogue. “Among such colors is Prussian blue.”

Yet two years ago, the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London included Prussian blue in an exhibition on the history of colors, highlighting its use in architects’ blueprints and Japanese woodblock prints.

The Shoah’s dark shadow was nowhere in evidence. But it’s overwhelming in concentration camp scenes of any color.

What might be more interesting are the relative impacts of a painting and a photograph of the same scene. Jusidman based his works on photos, some archival and some he took himself.

The paintings exist on their own terms and are unaccompanied by explanatory text. That leaves viewers free to explore their own reactions, and those with even a basic grasp of the Nazi plan to exterminate Europe’s Jews will find themselves in a dark place.

The photos, on view in an easily missed side room in the Contemporary Art Galleries, have a different effect. They are cold documentation, with equally cold explanations of what the camera captured.

The text, while often devastating, supplants soul-searching with information, and the photos are best seen after viewing the paintings. For example, the shot of the quarry at Mauthausen is accompanied not by musings about trees, but testimony from Nuremberg of how SS men amused themselves by forcing prisoners to leap to their deaths from a precipice.

Elsewhere, a story is relayed from another SS official that Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler wished prisoners to be “exterminated in a manner which caused them least anxiety and suffering,” for which he was described as “a very kind-hearted man.”

Without these details, viewers may gaze on blue scenes of gas chambers and try to imagine a fathomless level of inhumanity.

Then they can read that what happened was worse.

j.ruddy@theday.com

IF YOU GO

What: “Yishai Jusidman: Prussian Blue”

Where: The William Benton Museum of Art, 245 Glenbrook Road; Contemporary Art Galleries, 830 Bolton Road; Dodd Center for Human Rights, 405 Babbidge Road, Storrs

When: Through Dec. 15

Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 1-4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday

Admission: Free

Information: https://benton.uconn.edu