The power of observation

Lynette Ten Krooden's textures are so distressed, her subjects so spiritual, it takes a while to notice that she's a real artist and that her work has real power.

The South African artist Lynette Ten Krooden's work is on display at the Majlis Gallery in Dubai.

Lynette Ten Krooden, unfortunately for her, produces the sort of tasteful, dippily hippyish landscape paintings that might look at home hanging beside a dreamcatcher over a Past Times dresser. Her textures are so nattily distressed, her subjects so diffusely spiritual, it takes a while to notice that she's a real artist and that her work has real power. There's a near-animistic sense of the energies that the land can convey here. Yet for some reason, everything comes disguised as decor. It's a mystery that so outdoorsy a sensibility should at first seem so domesticated, but there it is.

For the most part, Krooden's latest show at the Majlis Gallery continues in the same vein as her last one: scenes of South African mountains, coast and veld, rendered in rough-textured paintwork and gold leaf. These are good-looking pictures. Moreover, the artist has an impressive range of party-piece techniques to sustain the interest when the view starts to get monotonous. Fossil Reef, for instance, shows cliffs descending to an indigo bay. The image is built up in layers of paint over gold foil: the mountains are crinkled, peach-coloured massifs. Swirls in the gold substrate suggest ripples in water. There's a huge sense both of weight and depth; Krooden knows her materials and knows her subject.

Similarly impressive results are achieved in Rain Curtain. A rolling plain forms the stage for the spectral columns of a weather front. These are cut with shafts of light and dwarfed by a wide white emptiness behind them. It takes a while to puzzle out how Krooden managed such a ghostly effect - on inspection, the bars of rain are just stripes of black and brown paint, covered over with glazes of white. But it's startling enough when you see it. In fact, it's sublime.

Message Mountain II evokes the vaporous, poetic quality of Japanese ink painting. A triangular peak appears like a twist of hair through a fog bank. In the foreground scraps of gold, outlined in pen, suggest kanji. The piece has a serendipitous look, one that is probably the result of immense amounts of work. Krooden's studies of buildings are more elusive still: a pair of works titled Evening Mosque and Ancient Mosque present scratched and murky masses, looming out of granular obscurity. The style splits the difference between late Whistler and late Bomberg; it's both grave and lovely. The Marriage, meanwhile, may actually be figurative, though the tonalist impulses are carried so far here that it's impossible to say for sure: a pair of shadows slant across a roaring grey vacancy, their sombreness relieved by a meditative calm.

It must be said that there's a rather pandering commercialism to some of the work. The Little Gems series, for example - tiny illuminated landscapes in crimson and gold, painted on handmade paper - are too obviously aimed at visitors who'd like a Krooden but don't want to break the bank. There's a market-town bohemianism about them that seems unworthy of Krooden's talent. Thankfully, there are signs that she knows it, that she's trying to break out of the trap of tastefulness. The least characteristic item in the show, Stone Landscape and Birdwatchers, is a huge facsimile of pages from her sketch book. It looks like the storyboard for a Humphrey Jennings film: in a series of hasty boxes we see ideograms of a sailing boat, an aeroplane, terraced houses, the sun at different elevations. A couple of these squares have been painted over, like roughs for further Little Gems. Then there are more developed landscape sketches: a valley draped in vines, a tree-stump standing in a rippling pool, a couple of jagged tors. Birds fly freely across the page, inky tangles reminiscent of Quentin Blake. And at the bottom, human figures are minimally indicated: a pair of birdwatchers sit with their backs to us, binoculars raised to survey an expanse of marshland. A woman walks into the distance.

There's a rapt quietness about all this, an unselfconscious pleasure in observation. Hanging beside this piece on the gallery wall are more facsimiles, printed on rice paper and bulldog clipped together. Along with further nature drawings, the sheets are crammed with frantic petroglyphs - spirals and snakes, hands and fishes, geometrical arrangements that resist identification. One gets the sense of some madly syncretic investigation, a tunnelling through landscape into universal myth. The best of Krooden's finished paintings offer faint echoes of this excitement. It's good to see her move closer to the source.

Lynette Ten Krooden, until April 30, The Majlis Gallery, Bastikya, Bur Dubai.