War and the cosmos are the subjects of the 24 pictures in Dozier Bell's exhibition of recent work at DFN Gallery. The painterly impulse - rich, nuanced and layered - is at their heart. It's as evident in a series of charcoal drawings - smaller than postcards - that combine tonal depth with exquisite precision of detail, as it is in her large and dramatic acrylics on canvas.

Quiet and understated, the war pictures are derived from documentary and reconnaissance photographs of World Wars I and II. The use of older source material, and the distant quality of the violence and destruction, take these pictures beyond the polemics of contemporary politics and into a more mysterious, spiritual realm. The tiny charcoal-on-acetate Pacific, an image of a bomb exploding over the ocean, is almost hallucinatory in detail - a cataclysmic event seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Several drawings in this series show far-off battleships and shells through the lenses of radar, landsat and other remote positioning devices.

These works create a frame of reference for more ambiguous images. Surface 4 would be simply an expanse of sea with a tilted horizon if it were not seen through the ominous sight-lines of a periscope. In Marker, a luminous river flowing through the tranquil countryside is viewed from the cockpit of a reconnaissance plane. In other pictures, such as Conflagration and Conflict Series no. 74, only the titles, context and a bit of afternoon haze that might be the smoldering remnant of a bombing raid hint that the peaceful scenes are fragile and transitory.

In contrast, Bell's dramatic sky-scapes evoke the machinery of a vast celestial struggle. Their compositions allude to sources as diverse as star charts and 17th-century religious paintings. The clouds are keenly observed, but are less about recording nature at a given moment than about giving form to immense cosmic energy. In Ring, a dark vortex consumes - or maybe explodes into - a brilliant light. In Seraphim, 2, the sky is literally divided between darkness and illumination. There's an apocalyptic feeling in even the most subtle of these pictures, like Burn Off, in which a small intense sun and the clouds surrounding it seem veiled by the shadow of an oncoming eclipse or the haze of battle.

Bell's use of the crosshairs and sightlines in several of the cosmic paintings suggests an equivalence between earthly cycles of war and peace and the celestial cycles of destruction and creation that play themselves out over eons, inevitable and indifferent to human will. As a device it felt distracting and a little arbitrary, although it does convey an uneasy sense of powerlessness in the face of forces beyond our control. Its most successful use is in a painting titled, aptly enough, Key, where it is architecturally integrated into a dramatic spiral of clouds, suggesting the ribs of a dome. A radiant light pours into the center of the painting, hinting at a mysterious union of the individual with the cosmic energy of the universe.

Bell has a metaphysical vision that comes through in the installation. But even if you don't share her philosophical bent, the individual works are compelling in their subtle and expressive beauty.