Though the suburban landscapes reflected in the chromed and mirrored surfaces of Chris Woods's new photorealistic paintings are the same as always-the cookie-cutter architecture of the Trans-Canada Highway near his Chilliwack home-the artist's latest works are affecting in ways his earlier pieces were not.

The lure of Woods's early paintings was the simplicity of the artist's naturalistic portraits of his group of youthful friends, spot lit by the bright colours and logos of North American fast-food culture. The best of these works were filled with an odd sense of ennui-slackers acted out odd rituals, played Galileo with a toy telescope, or tried to start a fire by rubbing cans of 7-Up together-and redeemed by the exhilarating rush of the paintings' tight finishes and jewel-like colours. Woods's early paintings exposed a dichotomy between the unrealistic expectations generated by fast-food culture, and those condemned to live in it. At their worst, their glossy finish and air of technical perfection made them seem like Coke ads, exotic views of an unreal world Woods refused to condemn as totally unappealing.

In Woods's new paintings, the worlds of advertising and corporate branding are held at a remove. It's as if a sheet of smoked glass has been slipped between Woods's characters and their surroundings. His characters are acutely aware of their own estrangement. Take a painting like Fourth of July. A man and woman sit slumped against a gigantic, backlit advertising display in an indoor mall. The Ralph Lauren ad features a photographic close-up of a billowing American flag. As if in homage to the photograph, the man holds a little Ralph Lauren-monogrammed paper flag, while the woman holds a handful of lit sparklers. The paper flag and the sparklers' trails of coloured light are painted flatly, so that they sit flush against the picture plane, introducing a note of unreality into the supposedly "realistic" scene. The rest of the mall is deserted. Lights are low. The couple's body language signals an attitude of weary resignation, of tiresome waiting for an event that has somehow passed them by, thereby demonstrating the sad inadequacy of their own attempts at energetic "participation".

If you consider that the source for this painting is, like every other one of Woods's interiors, no more than a stone's throw from his home and studio, Fourth of July can also be seen as a kind of metacommentary on the way that American corporate culture busily reproduces itself worldwide, like kudzu.

Two other paintings, Lighthouse I and II, continue Woods's theme of social estrangement. In Lighthouse I, another male-female couple waits at a Chilliwack bus shelter. Unknown to them, a photo ad in the bus shelter behind their backs presents an image of them standing shoulder-to-shoulder, straight and tall, their body language reminiscent of Soviet or Chinese propaganda painting. In comparison, the real-life couple slouched forward in the painting's foreground seem distanced from each other, gazing down the road for a bus that, like Samuel Beckett's Godot, will never arrive.

Lighthouse II depicts a couple retrieving in a Coke from a pop machine whose shiny plastic case is emblazoned with a picture of the same pair, smiling and holding frosty bottles of Coke. The vending machine, conversely, has just dispensed a single stubby aluminum can, thereby highlighting a discrepancy between the dream lifestyles depicted in expensive corporate advertising and the masochistic cycle of purchase-disappointment-purchase that characterizes most consumers' real-life experiences of lukewarm hamburger, stale cigarettes, and flat Coke. There's an air of sexual disenchantment to this picture that works really well-the couple in the ad only have eyes for each other; the phallic shapes of their Coke bottles carry all sorts of connotations-but overall, Lighthouse II isn't as effective as many other pictures in the exhibition. In particular, the real-life couple's body language isn't naturalistic but a stagy, almost cartoonish caricature of disappointment.

Many of Dreamland's other works are as formally unconventional as anything Woods has ever produced. These odd painting-sculpture hybrids, which crib from Maxim covers, Vanity Fair ads, and Gap campaigns to good effect, suggest a move away from photorealism toward a kind of contemporary pop art reminiscent of the style of American painters like James Rosenquist and David Salle. Woods lacks these artists' capacity for icy irony; however satirical he may be, his pieces are always sincere. But in art-making, sincerity is no guarantee of success, and Woods's sincerity has sometimes worked to his disadvantage. Here, on the other hand, his choice to attack media images head-on is effective.

Christopher's Masterpiece is a huge folding screen that resembles an open magazine. The magazine's painted "cover" is a reproduction of a recent Vanity Fair cover, in which Woods has substituted his face for that of pudgy teen heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio. This cover, along with interior panels depicting Woods as a Gap model and a Calvin Klein CK One character, is funny in a deeply subversive way. Woods hasn't copied that magazine cover and ads entirely faithfully; little flakes and chips of paint protrude from the advertisements' texts, signalling their status as handmade fakes. The CK One panel is particularly successful, because its self-portrait, painted with what, for Woods, is extraordinary care and attention, clashes with the slick finish of the ad layout in a surprisingly effective way. Here painting's ability to inform viewers about a subject's inner life is contrasted with advertising's ability to do the same job, and advertising comes up sadly short.

Another semisculptural work, Sapphire, is a large painted cabinet, based on a church altarpiece. Closed, Sapphire presents a flatly rendered portrait of four Gap models' faces. Opened, it reveals two views of a young couple. The central panel, which depicts the couple warming themselves at a magical fire flickering in a Gap bag, doesn't come off at all. The couple's body language is stiff and unreal, while the fantasy landscape behind them looks like it was cribbed from a 1970s Yes album's gatefold. Sapphire's side panels, on the other hand, are the best paintings Woods has made in years. These narrow panels depict the same couple, separated from each other and curled on a cold, white-tiled floor, asleep, with only Gap bags for pillows.

In these paintings, as in many others in the show, Woods's growing skill as a painter has begun to take his work in surprising directions. The new works are less about cheeky takes on advertising culture, and more about painting itself-its history, its ability to address the world in ways that contemporary forms, like advertising and magazines, can't. It is a measure of Woods's success that his new paintings hark back to classic naturalistic painting, yet are still identifiably of their own moment, their own time.

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