For Dora Holzhandler life often seems to be a dance. Or a feast. Or the two together. Certainly a happy place, full of colour and movement. And yet, in a way, repose is the keynote of her art. The lovers lie, relaxed, in each other's arms. The family sites quite primly round the meal table. The dancers are caught in Anglo-Saxon attitudes, like figures in the Bayeux Tapestry. The world moves slowly, philosophically, surveyed by sun or moon.

E poi, se muove, as Galileo once observed. The movement, like the passion, resides not in splashy, agitated brushwork of Romantic fantasy, but in the cunning juxtaposition of colour with colour, pattern with pattern. It seems curiously ironic that Holzhandler is almost always lumped in with a host of 'Naïve' painters, for artistically the last things she can be is naïve. Not for her the facile formulas of a book that I saw recently in America: ranged alongside manuals on Watercolour Technique, Mastering Perspective and such was Teach yourself to Pain Naif, which instructed readers on how to divest themselves of any knowledge they might have acquired and paint like some peasant on a Ukrainian farm.

Holzhandler, on the other hand, is, after all, a product of formal schooling: she attended the Anglo-French Art School in St John's Wood postwar, when she was twenty. We do not know exactly what she learned there, but it must have been something like artistic control. Ideas she already had in abundance - and very probably the outlines of her own distinctive vision. Fortunately her teachers saw something very special in her: if she was naïve, that could be remedied without harm, but nothing must take the fine bloom off her innocence.

It is beyond doubt that her vision of the world is the product of an almost preternatural innocence. She lives in the world, of course, but is not quite of it. It is no doubt the strongly and consciously Jewish element in her subject-matter that makes us think sometimes of Chagall. But whereas his loving couples tend to fly through the upper atmosphere, hers are clearly anchored to beds or divans in the real world. Sometimes, even one can glimpse a recognisable landscape through a window.

But even without such physical clues, their floating through life is clearly psychological rather than fairytale. Love (including but not limited to sex) has that effect on people. And these people, though conforming to Holzhandler's typical physical type - round races, seraphic smiles on their tiny mouths - they are also thoroughly corporeal. It is not for nothing that Holzhandler has recently been included in a picture-book of Breats in Art, where her art looks totally at home in the exalted company of such relentless realists (certainly where women's anatomy was concerned) as Renoir, Gauguin, Klimt and Matisse.

Naturally, in each case documentary realism is subordinate to personal vision: how Renoir dread of women's breasts was very different from the way that Klimt dreaded of them. And of course Holzhandler's take on the subject - yes, she is the only female artist included- is different again. But she, like the rest, begins with the real body of the real woman, and extrapolates from there. And, if anyone is in any doubt, she does draw superbly: one need only look at her most unpretentious works on paper to know that.

The look of her work, then, is a convention. And strictly her own. Who else do you know who has found such joy in checker-patterns? She does, with the greatest glee, all the things that one is supposed not to do, in what one wears as in what one paints. the bed my be covered with a black-and-white or brilliantly coloured check, and on it may well be someone wearing a quite different check, and the whole thing may be carefully placed in a room which has its own again differently check-patterned walls. And what ought to be a wildly discordant jangle gives off instead the happiest of vibrations.

This sort of, for what of a better term, Op Art creates its own kind of movement within an otherwise static composition. And it is sometimes that, sometimes the apparent rippling and twitching involved in classic Pointillisme, which gives sparkle and variety to Holzhandler's otherwise monumentally immobile compositions.

This also is where the dance or the illusion of dance in Holzhandler's work comes into play. In the current exhibition Biblical maidens dancing outside Jerusalem rub shoulders with the hobby-horse dancers of Padstow, not to mention the trio of flute-playing lovelies on the lawn outside Brighton Pavilion, who seem to casual inspection to be doing something with a definite resemblance to the wibbly-wobbly-wibbly dance that Cleopattera did. The movement is palpable, but it is all on and in the surface. Surely a very sophisticated way of doing things for any common-or-garden Naif?

Sophisticated, yes. But working with a curious directness which can only come from some sort of divine innocence. It is as though we become unaware of the artist, because we have moved in closer: we are not seeing any more what she does, but what she sees, what she thinks. Remember the child who, when asked what she does in art class, replies that she thinks, and then draws lines round her thinks. Holzhandler's thinks are a little more complicated than that: more like a magic carpet hovering before her inner eye. All she has to do is jump on, and let it take her and us where it will.

John Russell Taylor (2004)