The French-born artist Marc Rambeau has been largely based in Australia for the past 35 years and more recently has called Canberra home.

Aged in his mid-70s, Rambeau has been a traveller for much of his life and after a thorough training in European conventions of art making in France.

He has worked in the South Pacific for a number of years as well as in China, where he has studied some of the peculiarities of the Chinese calligraphic tradition and working with tissue papers.

The style that he has devised is peculiarly his own with a heavy impasto application of paint and an intense and vibrant palette.

The core of this exhibition is based on a trip he made to the Flinders Ranges in South Australia and to Kati Thanda (Lake Eyre).

The focus is on intense radiating colour that has a pulsating energy.

The most effective works at the exhibition are very thickly worked oil paintings on beautiful, highly textured French hand-made Colombe paper.

They appear like slabs of paint that symbolically denote landscape forms almost sculpturally with a real three-dimensional quality.

Rambeau achieves the rare quality of inner luminosity in his paint so that it appears to shine from the inside with luminous outer edges.

Some of the most successful paintings, including Australian red earth no 3 and Vertical landscape, each measuring 82 by 122 centimetres, attain a sense of monumentality that far exceeds the physical size of the works.

The paintings are characterised by their sense of presence and intensity.

The textured surface is tactile and is further enhanced by the irregular low relief quality of the Colombe paper.

In a curious way, Vertical landscape immediately brings to mind in its compositional format the late canvases of Mark Rothko with their irregular shapes and pulsating colours.

In both Rothko and Rambeau you perceive the work not only on a visual level, but inwardly, on a spiritual level.

Rambeau seduces you with his slabs of colour through which he invites you to enter the work as if through a secret doorway and once inside there is a whole complexity of possible interpretations.

As a veteran artist who has been exhibiting for many decades, Rambeau now works intuitively moulding his forms like an inner vision.

In much of his earlier work there was a greater literalness.

The landscapes were dotted with salt bushes and distinct topographical forms, that now have been subsumed into an abstracted vision that lends itself to endless levels of ambiguity.

It is something that may have been originally viewed with the external eye but has now somehow morphed into an inner vision.

Rambeau's Le voyage en Australie is no longer only a physical journey, but also a spiritual quest, a metaphysical journey, where in a very personal way he is making comments about the feel of the place - the heat and the colour - a unique place with a unique palette.

It is one that reveals itself in ways that are beyond the purely visible ones.