Steven Harvey's Unrendered room at ANU Drill Hall Gallery has simple marks

Steven Harvey is a Sydney-based painter aged in his mid-50s who exhibits with James Erskine's Liverpool Street Gallery in East Sydney. It is a gallery well known to ANU Drill Hall Gallery visitors, who have already seen the Australian painting from the Erskine collection show and the Karl Wiebke exhibition also associated with the Liverpool Street Gallery. Much of this exhibition is from the Erskine collection or courtesy of the artist and the Sydney gallery.

Harvey is essentially a gestural non-figurative artist for whom the physicality of the mark is of prime significance. His painting process appears to be essentially intuitive working from the inside to reveal a composition rather than from preconceived designs.

Forms are simple, almost accidental, and gain their poignancy through their lucidity and transparency of means. The colour palette is also kept simple, sometimes even austere, where less is best and it is the aesthetics of understatement that rules the choices made.

The artist appears fluid in his choice of media, predominantly oils or acrylic but the carriers onto which these paints are applied are varied and include canvas, polyester canvas, handmade papers and compressed cement.

In fact, some of the strongest pieces in this exhibition are the simpler designs in acrylic on compressed cement, such as his Magneto Receptor Rock Paper Scissors Lover (2018). Here there are a few bold lines in red where the drag marks of the brush as it skims the surface texture are as important as the shapes that emerge from its journey.

The enigmatic title, Magneto Receptor Rock Paper Scissors Lover, evokes a mystical reality where the marks made in paintings possibly refer to primeval marks made by nature that by-pass the rational intellect. Magnetoreception (usually spelt as a single word) is a natural sense that allows some organisms to detect a magnetic field through which they can determine direction, altitude and location. The most popular example is homing pigeons that, through determination of magnetic fields, can calculate complex navigational manoeuvres. In other words, some creatures can detect the earth's magnetic field and use this information for navigation and locations.

Back to Harvey's painting. Through the title, he links the idea of magnetoreception with the absurdist notion of "rock paper scissors lover", which, at least in my mind, brings forth parallels with early surrealism and dada. It is like a contrast with a spontaneous free-wheeling design and a complex afterthought.

This sort of labyrinthine complexity in the engagement with a field of reference is characteristic of many of the paintings at this exhibition. The constant idea is to use art to evoke a framework of complex associations.

This exhibition is a survey of Harvey's work from the Coastal Walk series that dates from 2002 through to the present.

There is a progression from the complexity of the earlier work with built up slabs of colour, through light and breezy pieces more minimalist in their orientation.

Harvey takes his starting point from Sydney painters like Tony Tuckson, while in the broader international context, the late work of Philip Guston and contemporary artists like Sean Scully.

Harvey speaks of finding and enjoying solitude by being, enveloped by the great, vast landscape of this country and, in a way, in his paintings, he seeks to envelop the viewer through a mass of mysterious marks.