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Timed to open during the Toronto International Film Festival (where the auteur has the world premiere of his latest cinematic offering, "Miral"), Julian Schnabel: Art and Film is a comprehensive conversation of the artist's works (primarily on canvas, tarpaulin and cloth), that are inspired by and have been known to inspire his works in film. 

Taking over the 5th floor of the gallery, approximately fifty pieces are on display, ranging from 20"x24" Polaroids of Mickey Rourke, Placido Domingo, Christopher Walken and Schnabel himself, to 6 meter (18 foot) works that wash over you with such visceral effect that you'd be forgiven for forever disregarding the injustice served by any published representations in the official catalogue or elsewhere.

His surfing photos, blown up to building size, represent the waves at their towering best, while his portraits of Andy Warhol and Gary Oldman are so finely nuanced we can almost see Shnabel's fellow artists' hearts breaking before our eyes. The sculptures are wondrous and weird, confusing and challenging and open to each viewer's interpretations in the most deliberate way. Schnabel is not a preacher, he has never told people what to think of his works. He has not been shy in telling people his work is important, but he allows each of us to hold our own regards, our own remarks, our own interpretations of the work to be as truthful to the work as his own.

Schnabel is a larger than life character, from the pajama shirts and bathrobes he dons in public, to the shorts he showed up in to discuss the exhibition with the gallery's wool-suited curator, David Moos. He often paints outside in his studio in Montauk, and created no shortage of discussions with his building of the pink Palazzo Chupi in the West Village of New York. He owns works by many masters, and recreated his own Picasso and Basquiat-like paintings for the movie "Basquiat" when the originals were not available.

If there's a flow to Schnabel's oeuvre, it's a willingness to cut through figurative pieces with imposing streaks of color, or of none. By doing so, the artist adds movement and speed through stationary forces, creating an energy that's as palpable in his earliest works on show (including his revolutionary tribute to Gaudi, the plate paintings) as it is in his most recent pieces (the newest, a piece retrieved from Roman Polanski, and then painted over in his honor, eschews an almost repulsive prettiness that allows the mind to bend from beauty to brashness in a single glare).

For those of you who've followed The Nation of Artists, you'll know our bias toward the works of the 80s art icons who created a new language in American painting following the non-figurative minimalism of the Rothko/De Kooning/Pollock era. The AGO (re-rendered by Frank Gehry just a few years ago) put together this show quite quickly, but with the exception of a couple of typos in the catalogue, one could assume that this retrospective of sorts had been on the gallery's cards for quite some time.

This is a "don't miss" exhibition, and will hopefully travel south of the Canadian border. That the artist has an enthusiasm for film is undeniable, and was unmistakeable long before he attempted "Basquiat" - a gem of a film with an awe-some cast that captures the mood of the 1980s art world as well if not better than any film before it or since. All of Schnabel's films before this newest, "Miral," dealt with artists who were tortured, physically or mentally. That Schnabel himself seems to have it all together might be his most masterful work to date.