In today's art world, classifying a work of art as decorative is not generally thought to be a compliment; indeed, it is tantamount to saying the work is trite.

And yet, ornamentation seems to fulfil an important, even profound need in human life. Consider the amount regularly spent on personal adornment, not to mention the ongoing expenditure on other decorative matters, such as our houses and cars etc. At Christmas we generally go all out to decorate just about everything, in celebration of the season. Decoration seems a necessary aspect of personal identity and expression.

The idea that ornament is anathema in modernist art thinking goes back, at least, to the teachings of the Bauhaus, the influential German art school of the earlier 20th Century. From that institution came the slogan, "less is more".

With the rise of Nazism in Germany, many educated Germans left their country and a large number immigrated to the United States. This included a number of Bauhaus faculty and some ended up teaching at such illustrious universities as Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth. It was by this means that the teaching of austerity in art and architecture expanded throughout the western world.

Despite the pressure to conform to the modernist teaching of austerity and abstraction during the mid-20th Century, by the latter part of that era, some artists were choosing to return to earlier or exotic artistic modes, such as realism and the decorative. With the rise of feminist art teachings in the 1970's, the decorative took centre stage in the work of such artists as Joyce Kozloff, Miriam Schapiro and Valerie Jaudon.

The paintings of Ernst Arnold Bauer definitely tends to the decorative and his present exhibition at the Kaleidoscope Arts Foundation are no exception. Actually the work in this exhibition dates from 1995, so they are not recent creations at all. The show is a selection of 20 watercolours from a much larger series of about 150 floral paintings he made over a two month period in the winter of that year. Most were in watercolour, but a few in acrylic. The subject allowed Bauer, the liberty to emphasise colour, something he obviously relishes.

When I saw the exhibition, I was reminded of the floral paintings of Emil Nolde and thought it possible that Bauer was aware of and possibly influenced by these earlier works, but it seems that it is not the case. Even the use of the wet-in-wet watercolour technique by Bauer is similar to that used by the earlier renowned German.

The exhibition is hung fairly sequentially, beginning with the first painting he made in the series, which is a depiction of a snow rose, that he happened upon, growing in an area of thaw, just outside his Munich studio. After that experience, all the other flowers in the series are generic and although often appearing hibiscus-like, that is accidental. As Bauer said, it was winter, so with the one exception of the snow rose, there were no other flowers around.

The artist, in a talk he gave at Kaleidoscope on Wednesday evening, said that over the short period that he worked on these paintings, he was hardly aware of what he was doing. He was working in Germany at the time and felt the need for Spring in Winter, so he just went with the urge and working quickly, painting almost without thought. It was as if he, the artist, was merely the conduit through which the creative happened.

This is a pleasant, appealing show. I recommend seeing it, and if you have not yet visited the Kaleidoscope Arts Foundation, that too, will be an enjoyable experience.

The show continues through March 14.