Jake Boone is a young artist with big ideas. One of his big ideas hovers around the problem, as he puts it, of "how to create social commentary in painting without resorting to illustration or that which is easily reduced to political dogma."

For Boone, a Canadian painter now working in Vermont, the struggle to communicate effectively using what is, after all, a famously and stubbornly mute art form, reaches back to his very first works of a decade ago when he was making paintings about the death penalty, paintings that "gradually led me to a more general concern with issues of brutality, power disparities within social structures and ideas of hopelessness and hope."

Boone cites U.S. linguist Noam Chomsky as a central influence on his work: "Chomsky has helped me understand how we 'read' information," Boone has written, "and how this information can most effectively be presented."

For his current exhibition at Toronto's Red Head Gallery, Boone is showing a body of new works that demonstrate the "two divergent manners of painting" to which, he says, he has been continually drawn. The majority of the pictures in the exhibition -- appropriately called Flip -- feature chromatically rich, patterned, highly textured grounds that threaten to expand, engulf and ultimately overwhelm the figures who contest them.

In a painting such as Low, for example, the comely head of a young woman, repeated rhythmically across the picture's burning red and gold-leaf surface, bobs like a cork on and within the oceanic fullness of the patterning. The pauseless ornateness of these worked grounds is partly the result of Boone taking a belt-sander to previous paintings and grinding them down, with an almost archeological determination, to their substrata, roughing up the canvases into fields of scarred and distressed chaos -- which he starts in again to rebuild.

For the rest of the paintings, Boone works in a radically different way. Here, as in the beautiful Cakes or the endlessly enigmatic Now You're Fucked, he works in what he considers as loose a manner as possible, repainting the composition daily, adding, subtracting and punctuating the large leftover spaces with precisely rendered figures and objects: actors and props for a painted play. These paintings are as spare and deliberate as the others are congested and operatic.

For Boone, they work toward what he calls a "creeping narrative," a kind of story-telling that is not linear but vertical, emerging from the impress of time. Curiously, the wan flatness of the figures, their static, icon-like isolation on the canvas, links them directly to the history of painting – to the work of Giotto, for example, or of Puvis de Chavannes.

What is not so clear, Chomsky notwithstanding, is what kind of information these opulent and circuitive works actually provide. Boone says he wants to locate the viewer in an "unbalanced position." This he has accomplished. The artist's citing of cartoonist Art Spiegelman is helpful here: According to Spiegelman, "one must avoid getting caught up in a silly kind of factuality that would miss the truth."

$500-$2,800. Until Jan. 5, 96 Spadina Ave., 8th floor, Toronto; 416-504-5654.