Art review: Nancy Sever Gallery, Canberra - Andrew Christofides, Mark Galea and Donald Laycock's Abstraction x 3

This is the second exhibition at the Nancy Sever Gallery that has been arranged in conjunction with the Charles Nodrum Gallery, in Melbourne, to bring the work of prominent non-figurative painters to Canberra audiences.

Of the three featured artists Andrew Christofides is possibly the best known. He was born in Cyprus, trained in London and spent 25 years teaching at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney. I first encountered Christofides' art in Rome, where he was an artist-in-residence at the British School in Rome and I was a visiting fellow. I don't particularly remember meeting him, but I recall his work. It was very tight, geometric, chequerboard-like designs with small vibrant cubes of colour. It was a little bit like a Mondrian painting whose elements had been scattered on one of those Renaissance tiled floors. For all of its minimal severity, there was tension at the edges, where elements wanted to break free of the imposed structures.

Margaret Thatcher did much to frighten creative people out of Britain and Christofides with his family settled in Australia in 1982. His work subsequently loosened up a bit, a more lyrical note entered into his art and he started to experiment with more dynamic and three-dimensional structures. The colour palette also became richer and more subtle and moved away from the simplicity of de Stijl, with its use of primaries. He exhibited his large and imposing canvases with the Painters Gallery, in Sydney, and Charles Nodrum, in Melbourne.

The work in the present exhibition marks a further move towards freer and more intuitive art, as well as showing a sense of humour and a growing autobiographical note. Although Christofides left Cyprus as a five-year-old, he has never lost contact with his island home. Patterns in the work can be related to Cypriot antique mosaic pavements and to Episcopal garments, while the quality of paint has developed a greater transparency and luminosity. Painting in thin veils of acrylic paint, he allows earlier layers to faintly show through, adding depth to his colour masses.

If we examine a major painting in this exhibition such as Agnostic (2010), the principal pattern reminds me of the crosses found on the garments of Byzantine images of bishops on Cyprus, perfectly and tightly articulated, the ochres and blacks speak of a subdued palette, while the elongated oval shape to the right adds a note imbalance and dynamism. What I admire in this painting is the use of the golden mean to divide the picture space, the static geometric structure on the left and the dynamism on the right creating a very effective and subtle composition with a degree of surface tension.

Donald Laycock (born 1931) is one of the veterans of the Melbourne arts scene, possibly best remembered for his paintings for the interior of Hamer Hall, in Melbourne. After an early interest in surrealism, he moved into paintings that examined in a holistic manner the cosmic universe and the shape of time. There has been a consistency in his art over a number of decades, with an inwardly spiralling vision. In his best paintings at this exhibition, including Trimestigus (2002), there is a considerable subtlety in the creation of the background veils of colour on which appear the blobs, splatters and splashes of vibrant colour. The artist appears in the role of an alchemist who transforms colours into a form of cosmic gold.

Mark Galea is the youngest of the three artists, aged in his early 40s, who has developed in his art a playful attitude to geometric minimalism. His woven, brightly coloured, acrylic canvases, including Broadcast (2011), have robust confidence in their arrangement of gradated colour bands. The boldness of scale and colour creates strong dominating canvases that radiate with energy.

These three very different artists, from three different generations of Australian abstractionism, are united in their conviction that art celebrates realities of its own making and only suffers when it mimetically copies representational reality.