There is an old adage amongst abstractionists that there is no such thing as new art, only new artists.

David Serisier was born in Orange, New South Wales in 1958, and received much of his training in Sydney, but spent his formative years in New York. In his art he builds on the discoveries made by European colour painters, especially Aleksandr Rodchenko about a century ago, and subsequently by Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Ellsworth Kelly and Brice Marden, plus some from the earlier generation of American abstractionists.

The primary concern in Serisier's art is with colour and light in all of their many manifestations. In his work he interrogates how we see and feel colour, and how colour affects us.

In other words the full gambit of its optical, physical and spiritual effects.

If Dan Flavin and James Turrell sculpt with colour to create their haunting and ambiguous spaces, Serisier is primarily a traditional oil painter, sometimes employing oils and encaustic, and it is through the arrangement of his canvases in this exhibition that he sets out to attract, entrap and seduce the beholder.

At the Drill Hall Gallery, in the central space Serisier creates an installation through his multi-panel paintings adopting a high chromatic key so that the whole space radiates with colour.

Recently he was quoted as explaining his approach to painting.

"I'm interested in how colour relates to the everyday, even though the colours are sourced from high artist colour systems, it's the ephemeral event as captured and presented by digital systems and various processes of re-formation," he said.

"In a sense it is the exploration of the issues of materiality and immateriality in the perception of colour and the artist's ability to play with the shape of time, where the transient transformation of colour and light, which is usually registered in the flicker of an eye, is slowed down and is allowed to develop a lasting and an hypnotic affect."

He has that rare ability amongst contemporary colour field painters to create a colour saturated space which is not simply dependant on optical gimmickry.

Serisier's work has generally been well served by James Erskine and his Liverpool Street Gallery in Sydney and a number of the paintings in this exhibition are drawn from the Erskines' private collection.

We are provided with both a recent major installation in the central space, plus two mini surveys of his practice, in the two side galleries.

I must confess that as a personal choice, I have always loved his highly textured, dark brooding canvases of the early 2000s, including Large vertical black painting, 2005 and Tondo No 11, black, 2000 which have been included in this exhibition.

Serisier is one of Australia's finest minimal colour field painters, who has honed his art over a number of decades and continues to create unforgettable paintings with radiating fields of colour that become lodged in our imagination as something rare, intensely beautiful and very real, but in an ineffable manner.