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Susanna Heller

• at Olga Korper Gallery
• $600-$85,000. Until Dec. 5,
• 17 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-538-8220

In the hands of a painter with less vision, less urgency, less hectic need to get it all on canvas than Susanna Heller, a work like Jerry's Wrecking Ball Takes Manhattan might seem merely unruly.

Heller stands a good distance off from good taste (that destroyer of artists), and would never be caught dead producing an organized, pleasing painting just for the wholesome decorum of it. She is an amiable outlaw, a hit-and-run, first-strike painter who lets nothing interfere with the way she sees things. She was born in New York; and Manhattan – which she studies endlessly from her Brooklyn studio – is her relentless subject. She tells me, as she busies herself hanging her new exhibition at Olga Korper Gallery, that soon after she was born, her mother held her up to the window and showed her the isle of Manhattan stretching out below them – the bristling buildings, the bays, the bridges. “I guess it never left me,” she says.

But she left it for a while. And it was during her years away, studying at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, that she met the teacher and painter who would become an enormous presence in her life: the late Gerald Ferguson. For over 20 years, she and Ferguson talked on the phone and e-mailed each other almost every day. It was only a few weeks ago, just before Ferguson's death, that they were discussing the painting that would become Jerry's Wrecking Ball Takes Manhattan . “I sent an image of the still-unfinished painting to Jerry,” Heller says. It was a vertical painting, but it arrived on his computer screen as a horizontal one. “And Jerry was adamant about how it was best as a horizontal, how, in fact, it had to be a horizontal,” Heller says. “And, of course, he was right.”

That's one reason he is referred to here as a “wrecking ball.” Not because Ferguson ever destroyed anything, but because he was very big on “making it new” and better. “Jerry was a wrecking ball, don't you think?” Heller asks me, referring, mostly to the late painter's national reputation as an artist who didn't suffer fools gladly. Yes, he was. A great and glorious wrecking ball.

But the wrecking ball in the painting is also an emblem of those swinging to and fro all over Manhattan, whacking down the venerably old and making room for the dubiously new. “Cranes have taken over the city,” notes Heller. “Buildings are beautiful when they are under construction,” she adds (Heller loves to paint buildings on their way up), “but are usually a disaster when they're finished.”

In Jerry's Wrecking Ball , Manhattan floats in a spider-webby cloud at the upper right (you can see the small green rectangle of Central Park), a buoyant fantasy city (you can also see a tiny Manhattan lodged inside the bigger one, as if the city were pregnant with itself) about to be brought low. Sometimes, I think Heller (who once occupied a studio in one of the twin towers) will never ever exorcise the horrors of 9/11 – which she painted maniacally in picture after picture – from her soul.

Her exhibition is full of vibrant, raw, fecund delights. Manahatta: The Source sees the island as “a big angry vulva as seen from an airplane,” with a benign, dreamy, untroubled Brooklyn up to the right. Her melting, honey-like interiors of Grand Central Station, painted from a catwalk high above the concourse, become a kind of liquid architecture. Her summary painting here of Manhattan, the 26-foot-long, painted frieze, On the Heel–Toe Express , is a panoramic sweep of the island that moves through time as well as space, beginning, at the right, in Queens, panning over oil tanks and wooden piers, entering the newly constructed city, and finishing, on the far left, with the Williamsburg Bridge. It's like an intake of breath that lasts a century.

Matias Sanchez

• At the Christopher Cutts Gallery
• $2,500-$11,500. Until Nov. 14,
• 21 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-532-5566

Gallerist Christopher Cutts seems happily smitten with hot Spanish painters. First, he shows the bardic, flamingly forceful paintings of Jose Ciria, and now these big, blazing, utterly delightful paintings by the Seville-based Matias Sanchez. Sanchez used to make socially caustic paintings (Goya hovered somewhere behind them), full of gaily murderous critique. For this exhibition, titled Insurrectos (Rebels), he takes to faux-naive, childlike depictions – in the cleanest, clearest, most chromatically innocent colour you'll see for a long time – of the painting life. Pictures bear such titles as Cuadros Para una Exposicion ( Paintings for a Show ), El Pintor y el Insomnio ( The Painter and Insomnia ) and Retocando un Cuadro ( Touching a Painting Up ), and are so refreshing you want to drop your keyboard and pick up a brush.