When I first attended an exhibition of Luke Wagner's paintings at the Salamanca Gallery in Hobart they drew me into a special place. Later, when I reflected on these images, they called to mind the lament of the great German social theorist, Max Weber The problem of modernity, wrote Weber, is the loss of our experience of reality as a whole. We are educated to believe that we can master all things by calculation. We lose the vision of the poet and the mystic, and in the process, the world becomes disenchanted.

Somewhere in our hearts we experience this as a deep loss, and therein lies the key to what so many have responded to in Luke Wagner's work. What Luke is doing in his landscapes is re-enchanting our world, not in the sense of adding something that was lost but of uncovering the reality of what is always already there. His paintings remove the veil. They take ordinary, familiar things a tree, a sheep track or a power pole - and show us that, in their essence, these things are magical. They bring what is disguised or lost from view back into presence literally, into our sight.

The tree especially is an emblem of the sacred and the mysterious. Some of these trees you can see if you drive along the midlands highway of Tasmania - or rather you fancy you see these trees, and in so doing, revision the landscape in a new way. When we look at Luke's canvases we see that the work exists on two planes - differentiation of form, in which for example, trees are trees, rivers are rivers, hills are hills - but at the same time something else is made manifest, that these are all a part of the quantum field, one subtle field of energy that lies behind the surface of things. We can interpret Luke's paintings as a visual conversation with that field - so that a tree is also a column of energy, a great uprush, or geyser, in the field of consciousness. We experience that place between the senses and the emotions; between the visual image and the inner eye.

Silence, 2004, Oil on Linen, 122 x 122cm

And this is the site of meditation - that location where the everyday meets the angelic. It's a world for most of the time unsighted, in the conventional sense, yet found here, between the canvass and the cortex.

Hence Luke's re-imagining, and re-imaging, of archetypal emblems. Working within the local - the greens and blues of the Tasmanian landscape - he gives us back the sacred grove, the magical lake and the river of infinity. In earlier work he has used the burning bush and - a peculiarly Australian motif - the power pole as a representation of the cross.

It seems fitting that these works are often surrounded by gold frames for they are, in essence, icons. But this is an imagery that transcends any set of spiritual beliefs and all can respond to this work with the same flush of recognition and awe.

Herein lies a universal poetry.

AMANDA LOHREY