Ian McKeever, Kings Place Gallery, London

For four decades Ian McKeever, who was born in 1946, has made art with steady purpose, and produced a body of work that is both prolific and highly distinctive. Yorkshire-born but much travelled, he has exhibited across Europe and is especially appreciated in Germany. He is also an eclectic writer on painters as diverse as Georgia O’Keefe, Vilhelm Hammershoi, the Victorian botanist Marianne North and the Russian icon-makers, and a deep reader in 20th century Modernism, from Eliot to Wittgenstein. Having previously held various teaching jobs, McKeever is now professor of drawing at the Royal Academy Schools.

He started as a conceptual artist, as much sculptor as painter, and was primarily occupied with big environmental subjects. His career might easily have had a similar trajectory to, for example, Richard Long’s. But gradually painting captured McKeever and I doubt if today there is a more thoughtful and committed practitioner in England.

His canvases are typically large, and invariably grouped together as themed series, in which the artist works out, or through, an obsession of the moment. These series have an intensity of atmosphere and an affinity for nature that has led the painter to be associated with (as the title of a 1997 group exhibition in California put it) “the re-emergence of British romantic painting”.

McKeever has said that his starting point is a spiritual one. A hero of his, William Blake, believed he was guided by angels; McKeever looks for a “presence, or aura, that I have to sense before I start the painting”. This may seem quaint in an era when fashionable artists are generally more interested in ironic psychology than in the spirit, but the idea of conveying the spiritual through non-representational art is one of the key legacies handed down from its originators, in particular Kandinsky and Mondrian.

McKeever has always made paint work hard – whether in overpainting photographed landscapes, as he did in his early days, or producing his turbulent “Lapland” paintings in the 1980s. His aim is not to represent nature but these works nevertheless evoked rock and water, leaves and roots, earth and sky, storm and stress. More recently, as his painting has become quieter and more reflective, McKeever has developed a special affinity for a pigment of pure, transparent white, ghosting it over disparate darker backgrounds to draw veils and unfocused lattices across the painted surface. The device infuses the work with mystery and has made McKeever renowned for his ability to suggest layers of depth. No reproduction can do justice to this effect: as with Rothko, to experience it you have to see the paintings themselves.

In the “Temple” series at Kings Place, the white forms that glide across the “upper” surface of stretched linen or cotton-duck are in the shape of upright ovals or, more precisely, eggs. Traced in dilute acrylic, these enigmatic ovoids sometimes overlap in series, as in the blur of slow photography, and sometimes nest like Chinese boxes. Beneath them are substrata of forms in oil paint, jagged yet roughly interlocking stalagmites and stalactites, or rectangular shapes reminiscent of the most abstract manner of William Scott. But McKeever is more organic than Scott. His multi-layered illusion gives something like the effect of a gigantic microscope slide.

That is one take on the paintings. But in abstract art all interpretation is open-ended. A useful monograph published to coincide with this exhibition stresses McKeever’s lack of interest in giving his paintings symbolic or narrative content. The title of the series, which was begun following a month-long visit to China in 2004, refers to the impact of the wooden Buddhist temples he saw. But he makes no attempt to show that impact in any visual way. Instead, there is a process that is something like free association, spinning off from the original stimulus in a recurring daydream of rocks and caves and floating ovals.

That is what places this artist squarely in the abstract tradition. Its aesthetic is the most elusive in all art – one in which artists themselves renounce representation, while inviting viewers to open themselves to its subjective possibilities. You are free to see whatever you fancy in these paintings, to make whatever you can of them, to daydream them.

Until October 17 , tel 20 7520 1485
‘Ian McKeever: Paintings’, by Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton, Michael Tucker and Catherine Lampert, is published by Lund Humphries