Lorne Wagman at Deleon White The fact that Lorne Wagman lives in Owen Sound, Ontario, clearly informs his work. These new oil paintings and ink drawings are muscular, sinewy renderings of what is close at hand: Apple trees in the snow (there are five), maple trees, robust cloudscapes and, perhaps most successfully, exalted paintings of humble local weeds -- plantain, burdock, mullen and dandelion.

Wagman loads on the paint with the sort of confident deliberation that brings Van Gogh to mind, or Kokoschka. His tree trunks and his weeds are twists of pigmented vitality, as much paint itself as what the paint depicts.

Like any card-carrying expressionist, Wagman bends colour to his will. He infuses the leaves of his weeds, for example, with luminous, searing greens unattainable in nature, and accelerates the redness of the naturally ruddy burdock stems to the point where they look like arteries pumping blood. Here is a nature deeply interfused, to use the poet Wordsworth's phrase, with the painter's own sensibility.

Sometimes Wagman's trees demonstrate a slightly dispiriting inevitability. The spread of their branches is often too predictable, their disposition in space stalwart to the point of stolidity. The weeds are better. Somehow, with Wagman, the lowlier the subject, the more compelling the treatment.

Another of the small paradoxes of this exhibition is that while Wagman obviously exults in the forcefulness, the intensity, of colour, he seems to me to be at his very best in his drawings, of which there is a small and almost apologetically offered selection in the exhibition. In the drawings, nature is fervour, with Wagman's line reaching out directly and capturing living plants in a heaving network of ink-lines, against which nature seems frantically to buckle and heave.

$225-$8,000. Until Sept. 8. 1096 Queen St. W. 416-597-9466.

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