Jake Boone

at Red Head Gallery

The artfully contrived and richly wrought paintings making up Jake Boone's exhibition – saturday boy makes good – is in some measure, he says, "the ongoing result of a dialogue between current and lost forms." And Boone is being literal, not metaphorical. His new paintings on canvas and paper have a great deal to do, in their current incarnations, with the artist's building them up, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of old ones, scraping away and sanding away what had gone before to prepare a place for the new.

His Lost Cause, for example, a big, bone-white picture in which a rather wan, thinly painted woman in pale blue clothing makes her way through the painting's rubbed and pitted, and otherwise brutalized, ground with a flashlight pencilled into her grasping hand. Lost Cause, Boone says, was painted over an early painting called Easy Patsy, and is also based on an etching by Kathe Kollwitz called After the Battle in which a mother searches for her missing son.

Boone's paintings, then, are the embodiments of the idea and effects of pentimenti – an engagement with what lies beneath a painting's surface and is allowed to show through. This becomes especially true with the artist's eight sumptuous works on paper in the exhibition where patterning and, imposed upon it (or, more accurately, co-mingling with it), a certain kind of obsessively recurrent imagery (ornate chandeliers or wall sconces, for example), strive for visual supremacy. These small, but information-rich paintings, teem with complexity: In addition to pattern and image, each is pinned and fixed with "a letter taken from an American dollar bill, representing both a different city and different federal mint (Boone, who is a Canadian, lives in rural Vermont and works at the Vermont Studio Center). Each of these delectable paintings, then, while newly minted, already has a history. And each is, I should imagine, inexhaustible.

$400-$3,000. Until May 24, 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 457, Toronto; 416-504-5654.