The wonderful Canadian-American artist Agnes Martin once perceptively observed, "When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection."

Martin, who died a little over a decade ago, painted marvellous, non-figurative and very subtle paintings, frequently in pastel tones that related to a grid or faint stripes. As you stood in front of one of her larger canvases, you were drawn into it as into some sort of transcendental experience. Although the questions that she set herself may have appeared quite concrete in her mind, she left us with relatively few clues, visual or verbal, and the exploration of the work became our personal experience, as her paintings were not about that which is seen, but that which is known in the mind and the link for the outsider is tenuous. This becomes apparent in her attitude to grids. She writes, "When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, this is my vision."

Suzanne Moss, who grew up on a farming property in south-western NSW, since 2001 has had a long and distinguished association with the School of Art in Canberra. Aged in her 50s, Moss is showing a selection of her paintings from 2012 to 2016, where the heritage of Martin shines through. It is quite a large, well-presented exhibition, of rather small, subtle meditative paintings executed in a subdued pastel palette. There is a "sameness" for much of the work, which is more a case of consistency than repetition. They are lyrical and contemplative pieces, mainly in acrylic on colour pencil on Belgian linen where, despite the minimal austerity of the forms, the paintings are distinguished by an inner luminosity – it is not so much a study of light or shadow, but of light that exists and glows within shadow.

Whether we speak of Moss, or Allan Mitelman, Robert Hunter or David Serisier, other Australian non-figurative artists who employ minimal forms and often a subdued palette, all of their works photograph poorly and make little sense in reproduction. They are not artists whose work in the Warhol sense punches a huge "wow factor" but when you see it in the flesh and invest it with a second glance and enter into its intricate and subtle colouristic games, the rewards are considerable.

Moss is an artist of light, one who deciphers intellectual riddles through veils of luminosity and the subtle nuances of form. The Sufi mystic Rumi, whom Moss acknowledges as one of the major influences on her thinking, once wrote, "The wound is the place where the Light enters you." In a strange way, I think of Moss' exhibition as a score of wounds where light enters questions such as the song of the moth, the appearance of love and the insides of a flame.