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INSTALLATION art is usually imaginary art. What little kick it has it gains from an illusion of presence rather than actual presence, as well as from imaginary aesthetics and imaginary money. Frequently, an art installation will occupy most of a large gallery, which impresses at first glance.

But the size of an installation almost always depends on dumb numbers: not one rock, wooden crate or discarded refrigerator, but 50, 100 or 500 of said object.

The age-old problem of scale, so arduous and unnerving for sculptors and painters trying to move up from maquettes and small-scale studies, is solved with contemptuous ease by installation artists, who simply adopt the modular approach. More of the same, please. Their works, as a result, look pleasingly symmetrical and disciplined, but only in the way that graph paper does. This doesn't mean installations are inexpensive: they involve logistics, and logistics can cost a bomb. But they are paid for, almost always, with imaginary money: money that belongs to neither the artist nor the commissioner but to institutions, sponsors, funding bodies and biennial organisers. Thus, everybody is allowed to feel good about themselves, but nobody has to take ultimate responsibility for what has been produced.

Israel's Zadok Ben-David is a sculptor first and an installation artist second. But annoyingly, to the extent that he is an installation artist, he defies almost everything bad I can think to say about the genre.

Ben-David's installation at Annandale Galleries in Sydney's inner west is a truly enchanting work of art. No reproduction can do justice to the experience of seeing it, since the experience takes place over time. At the heart of it is a sense of wonder, at once remarkably intense and remarkably sustained.

The work is called Blackfield. It consists of about 6000 small, two-dimensional sculptures of plants arrayed on a rectangular, uniform field of sifted sand. The plant sculptures are based on botanical illustrations of specimens found across the world. Ben-David has traced these illustrations, photographed them, adjusted the scale, then cut the resulting shapes out of thin sheets of stainless steel. The cutting has been done with a natty but perfectly ordinary technique, used in model-making, called photo-etching.

The details of the method need not detain us. But the beauty of photo-etching is that the shift in scale made possible by using photographic negatives allows for startling degrees of detail in the finished work. Thus each of these plant specimens achieves a dizzying kind of perfection, as well as an illusion of three-dimensional substantiality, since the photographs they are based on have perspectival recession built in.

Each sculpture -- so fine, so detailed -- might be kitsch on its own but arrayed across a uniform field they take on a different, almost indescribable quality that delights the optic nerve and confounds the imagination.

The main gallery upstairs at Annandale is probably the most beautiful exhibiting space in Sydney. As you enter it you see this field of small botanical forms from the front and it's an impressive sight: they are all painted black, which sets them off beautifully against the white sand (tinged with a subtle yellow).

But unlike Ben-David's related 1997 installation, Evolution and Theory (a field of smooth sand that stretched from wall to wall across this same gallery, making it impossible to go beyond a certain point), Blackfield can be circumambulated. In fact, it demands to be. For as you move to the other end of the room, you look back at the field of plant specimens and see them from the other side.

What you behold is a sudden blaze of colour, for each plant has been individually painted in an array of bright, sometimes lurid hues. The colours do not relate to the true appearance of each specimen but they are not quite arbitrary either: they presuppose a light source from a single direction. Together they express an extraordinary sense of beauteous overflow.

The whole conceit has a mirthful, pranking element -- look! surprise! -- but the prank is entirely benevolent, like someone dousing you from above with a cascade of tulip petals.

All the elements of installation art that, in less deft hands, can seem blowsy and indifferent -- the senseless repetition, the pointlessly large scale -- Ben-David deploys to enhance the overall effect. Without repetition and an even, grid-like spread of information, the effect of sobriety would be lost, cancelling out the surprise offered up by the riot of colour. Likewise, without the scale, the tension between the fine detailing of the plants and the sense of vastness would be lost.

As you can tell, I loved this work. Like much of Ben-David's work, it is loosely informed by scientific ways of picturing the world. But in a sense this interest in diagrams and textbook illustrations is merely a veneer. What he is most interested in, though it sounds cliched, is recapturing a sense of wonder.

There are those who see wonder as the exclusive preserve of the arts, while others find it hard to recognise wonder beyond the field of scientific inquiry. Ben-David does his best to combine both ways of seeing.

I find that some of his work can suggest a rather limp brand of feel-good humanism. But at his best -- and Blackfield is Ben-David at his best -- all the different areas of his intelligence fire at once and the results are tremendously uplifting.

If you travel from Annandale Galleries across Sydney to the Darren Knight Gallery, you get a show that is in many ways the perfect complement to Blackfield. Where Ben-David's art is aimed squarely at a public, the etchings -- small, intimate and incredibly detailed -- of young Japanese artist Etsuko Fukaya seem to be directed exclusively at private individuals.

But they are also infused with a sense of wonder. With her etching needle, Fukaya draws decorative bouquets of flowers and plants as well as strange groupings of animals, many of them fanciful. To say that she delights in patterning would be like saying Albert Einstein had quite a way with numbers. She takes the patterning of flowers, bushes, bird plumage and animal camouflage to such a pitch of miniaturised intensity that her images take on a hallucinatory quality. The marks are all incredibly fine and Fukaya's technique in rendering, for instance, the hair of a yak or the leaves of a bush is tremendously assured.

Like several other artists who show at Darren Knight Gallery, Fukaya works in ways that suggest unnerving degrees of dedication. Dedication in the service of clearly explicable goals is one thing, but here the artist's purposes -- indeed, the nature of her sensibility -- remain obscure, as if observed through thick glass or turbulent water.

Perhaps it's this elusive quality that appeals to present-day sensibilities, reflecting as it does something peculiar about the fate of aesthetics today. For most of the the past few decades beauty has been an embarrassment, allowed to thrive only in hiding or in the bedrooms of shy teenage girls. Now, like the learning that was safeguarded in monasteries during the Middle Ages, it is coming back, blinking, into the public arena in ways that are sometimes hard to recognise and always surpassingly strange.

Upstairs at Darren Knight is a small, taut show by New Zealand artist Jason Greig. Greig has come up with a series of ominous yet simple images that come alive under the pressure of his various treatments. He uses experimental, often chancy printing techniques such as monoprints and release prints (based on photocopies). He stains or otherwise interferes with the paper on which he prints. And, as a professional framer in his other life, he is careful to frame his works in interesting, evocative ways.

The titles -- A Warning, Red Devil, Apocalypse Then -- suggest dark, gothic moods. But the images feel strangely provisional. When they work, as in the remarkable Argus, they seem to have come into being accidentally, impersonally: a sense that only adds to the air of foreboding around them.

Ann Thomson, one of Australia's leading abstract painters, has a show of new paintings at Australian Galleries in Paddington. Thomson, who has won a slew of prizes and residencies through the years, favours lush, wobbly lines that are strongly reminiscent of Willem de Kooning. She can be marvellous. Yet too often her works feel structurally weak. All the elements seem to be in place; they just haven't been properly fastened.

When Thomson turns to figuration, as in most of the works in this show, she is able to fall back on a structure and a sense of space that do not need to be invented; they are, in one sense, already there before her. This does her pictures no harm at all.

The small, jaunty paintings here depict a rural area on the edge of Perdreauville, just west of Paris. We see fields, buildings and trees, all depicted with Thomson's trademark loose, juicy touch. The results recall Chaim Soutine more than Willem de Kooning, and they capture with admirable directness the weather, the atmosphere and a sense of flux in the landscape.

Finally, a small show devoted to drawings, prints and sculptures by Oliffe Richmond, who died in 1977, at Sydney's Watters Gallery is well worth a look. Richmond was born in Tasmania the year after World War I and moved to Britain a few years after World War II. He worked as an assistant to Henry Moore and was one of a circle of sculptors working in Britain who advanced the language of sculptural modernism.

He was more talented than better known Brits such as Lynn Chadwick. But his talent was insufficiently recognised in Britain and Australia. Australian sculptor Robert Klippel did his best to bring him to people's attention here and in 1980 he was the subject of a retrospective at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Again and again, he drew and sculpted figures that consisted of a heavy mass standing, sometimes leaning, on thin legs. It operated for him as a kind of archetypal, endlessly variable form, filled with pathos or a kind of primeval menace. The works in this show -- mostly lithographs and drawings -- are sketches of figures, heads, and groups of dancers. They combine to give a sense of the sculptor discovering and honing his subject on paper.

One feels privileged to be afforded such an intimate glimpse.

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