Glicksman, who used to work in Toronto but has now moved to Owen Sound, Ont., has been painting since the mid 1970s. For a long time I was only mildly interested in what he did. His work consisted of brightly coloured, rather roughly hewn, neo-primitive figures that looked both childlike and totemic -- a strange, unsettling mix of art brut (reminiscent of the earlier paintings of the French neo-primitive Jean Dubuffet) and persistent guilelessness.

But, as poet William Blake once wrote, "If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise," or words to that effect. It's not so much that Glicksman has been a fool (well, a holy fool, maybe; a transcendental goof), but more that he has persisted in a certain mad way of painting to the point where something has cracked wide open, and he is now in a sort of painterly free fall, painting with a demented urgency that piles paroxysms of delight into every picture.

Let us say this much: The paintings are all in oil (nothing but the best for this demonized painter, who is now going all out), and most of them are big (and even the little ones are big -- if, by big, we mean monumentally conceived and teeming with incident). Many of Glicksman's painting are, he maintains, autobiographical or at least journal-like. There is a lot of red in them. And searing blues and scalding yellows. And although the paintings still teem with masks and clatter with stick figures, and there are still arms and legs starting off in every direction, what is new and distinguished about them is the gleefully tempestuous brushwork he lavishes upon each picture, the exhilarating, bravado-filled passages of pure chromatic fervour brushed in everywhere, the cross-hatching, the pigmented dots and dashes, curls and swipes and twists left in the wake of Glicksman's marauding brush.