Andrew Morrow: Oh, Happy Meat

The Toronto-based painter Andrew Morrow makes some of the most complex figurative paintings in contemporary art. Trained as an illustrator, he brings faultless technique to the rendering of his images. His mostly panorama-format works draw on the traditions of history painting and the depictions of battles in vast landscapes. Morrow’s contemporary turn, however, is to populate his canvases with stock figures from the mass culture media world and set them loose in the midst of churning apocalyptic dramas. The centrepiece of the current show is an 8-by-16-foot canvas titled Oh, Happy Meat. Morrow leaves parts of the painting in an unfinished state and adds handwritten commentary that keeps imaginative options open and the chaotic atmosphere in suspension. His immersion of viewers into media mayhem is sharp and topical, and it’s not unlike the droll visual puns of American painter Mark Tansey; only Morrow’s world has heated up and fallen apart. (952 Queen St W, Toronto ON)