Although the paintings Mike Hansen showed in 'Structures" at the Art Gallery of Peel last autumn and the newer "Beautyrest" works he exhibited simultaneously at Toronto's Lonsdale Gallery may have been almost chronologically congruent as shows and morphologically related as objects, the "Beautyrest" works were, nevertheless, a great leap forward, conceptually speaking.

The pieces in 'Structures" were, for the most part, large, thick, shaped slabs of heavy encaustic on canvas, usually mounted on the walls in pairs. Probably because of the chunkiness of the works and, more particularly, because of their gustatory surfaces., much-probably too much-was made of the rich, high-calorie pleasuring they provided. Catalogue essayist Gordon Hatt clearly enjoyed describing the works, rather wickedly, as generators of appetite-"A creamy coat of encaustic is scraped and scumbled across a darker brown, like butterscotch on toast...."-and I recall referring to Hansens green-and-white veined Within Your Reach I (1998) in The Globe and Mail as "two slabs of gorgonzola."

The "Beautyrest" pieces, more of which were shown recently at the A.R.C. Gallery in Chicago, are lozenges of wood muffled up with mattress ticking stretched over the forms underneath, They look like eccentrically-shaped shards of real mattresses that te artist has somehow chopped, cut, twisted and tied into little mini-mattresses, morsels of mattress, satiny bon-bons. Like the work in "Structures," the "Beautyrest" mattressworks often come in pairs-two curving elements cosily nestled together-though unlike the earlier pieces, they also appear as singles. And unlike the earlier works, the mattress pieces are offered within emotionally ameliorative, colour-coordinated environments: most of them are presented hanging on walls that have been painted in soft, bedroomy colours. The small, single, pinkish-white Cozy Little Place floats on a powder-blue background, for example, while the two- part blue/flesh At Request languishes on a background of sandy pink.

It's obviously not a great leap from the idea of nourishment to ideas of eroticism and rest. The one conventionally follows the other (it is touching, is it not, that couples who intend to end their evening in bed so frequently begin it with dinner?). Two kinds of desire, then, and two kinds of fulfilment.

These desires are, of course, located among the desires money can satisfy. Hansen talks a good deal about the ways in which television -to which he seems to be seriously addicted- quickens our capitalist dreams and then humbly offers to make them manifest. Hansen likes to watch for what he calls "the sales frame' in TV commercials - the graphically epiphanic moment in the commercial's brief trajectory when the attainment of instant satisfaction (a kiss, a slug of Coke on a desert-hot day, the touch-down joy of a firm, new mattress) is tinctured by the further promise of infinite pleasure. That's the moment Hansen tries to sketch on the drawing pad he holds while he watches. These abstracted annota-tions (including colour combos) eventually inform the shape and structure of the "Beautyrest" works and their environments.

Hansen likes to ask himself big questions about desire. Who authors our needs? Who writes our dreams? What keeps the "Beautyrest" pieces humble, however, is the sublunary nature of their physicality - the way the mattress material is banalized by the tepid industrial flowers ornamenting the ticking, and the way they are sometimes grubby or, worse, stained. All this constitutes a radical depastoralizing process that keeps the works honest.

Like Mike Hansen, Toronto-based painter John Kissick builds his works from materials that, if they are not precisely abject, are certainly ordinary - thick-cut sandwiches of plywood, in Kissicws case. Of Kissick's most recent paintings, shown at Toronto's Leo Kamen Gallery this spring, most are 48 inches square and, because of the laminating of their plywood supports, six inches thick. They are thus almost objects. Except that their objecthood is decisively compromised by the maelstroms of Ab-Ex-derived painting Kissick lavishes on their upper surfaces. I say "upper" because he clearly paints the pictures on the floor (or at least hori- zontally)-you can tell from the fugitive sluicings and splashings of pigment that dribble incontinently down the edges.

When the painting was finally hung on the walll, these dribbles of paint are suddenly made horizontal. Now it's as if the vertical picture-plane were coming at you fast, leaving hot trails of outwash colour in its wake (like speed lines in a cartoon). In the end, however, this projectile-plane reading is roundly defeated by the intensity of the hot, convulsive painting pro- cess Kissick enacts there.

His paintings are so drop-dead gorgeous-if this is the kind of gorgeousness you like-that you lose all track of the layered plywood and its flighty edge-dribbles. Which may or may not be a good thing. The de Kooning-esque crisscrossed slathers of paint, by which holes and caves of space are slashed into being, the ballooning, illusory volumes carved out of the painterly turbulence, the Kline-like girders of black paint giving a struggling structure to the gaseous passages of colour, the painted knots and bows-still as precise and deliberate as they would be in a Jonathan Lasker, but clearly on the verge of fraying into pure chromatic bliss-all this sublime, colouristic chorale-making is so aggressively hedonistic you tend to simply brace yourself and let the whole miasma wash over you like a big wave.

The question these opulent paintings persist in asking, of course, is whether Kissick's version of classic Abstract Expressionism is ironically positioned or not. And it's hard to tell. Because we live in an utterly ironic age, it would be better for Kissick's stock on the art exchange if he were clearly making knowing glosses on Ab-Ex's beautiful childlike excesses. My own sensibility was formed in the furnaces of the New York School, and I find myself reading Kissik's paintings as rapture. But you give up something when you do this. And you feel it as a kind of loss, a flight from any genuine engagement with the paintings. You feel it as escapism. And I have yet to decide if that's good or bad.