They are both illusions and reminders of things seen — scratched and highly polished, liquid pools that bounce back light and deep spaces travelling back to mountains and skies.

The Montreal artist builds up layer upon layer of paint and resin on board for his gleaming surfaces. He makes it very clear he is staging a scene by dividing his space into two or three disparate, though similar, landscape images.

He makes it apparent that paint is an illusory material by putting in scratches and tiny spatters and leaving in drips as well as occasionally revealing bare board.

Hoffer refers very much to the history of landscape painting in his imagery and lacquered surfaces and calls two paintings After Constable. He paints a familiar vista of trees, fields, a distant mountain and a gorgeous sky, but they could be anywhere — the Annapolis Valley, Quebec, Ontario. You fill in the time and place and past experience.

For anyone who loves the colour blue, this show is a must, with Hoffer’s teal twilights above round trees with their inky green-black leaves. His blues, from pale sunny daytime blue to the intense quick-fading blues of sunset, are so beautiful you want to cry, or, perhaps it’s that twilight is such a nostalgic, compelling time, when day is about to turn to night, light to dark, life perhaps to death.

In the painting, Grove, the foreground earth is a rich red/brown beneath the trees and a hint of purplish mountain. Above the mountain is a glimmer of light and then a dense blue-green sky. Hoffer also switches to a less romantic palette for daylight yellowy greens in the land and grey-white skies.

While the artist, born in Branford in 1965 and an MFA graduate from Concordia University, makes illusion and drama apparent, he also embeds his ideas within glossy, dreamy surfaces so there is beauty and concept.

His solo show is on at Studio 21, 1223 Lower Water St.

In the back gallery, Montreal artist Dominique Goupil drains the colour and detail from the land in landscapes that, for a Maritimer, speak of fog and, for a reader of Wuthering Heights, take you out onto the moors.

These pictures demand time as you stop and contemplate a dark base, which sometimes reveals rich, burnished striations of reddish brown or pulses with a greenish cast over the black paint. The base slowly lifts up in perhaps a tree line for an uneven, blurred melding of land and sky and then up into foggy skies, which are gently striated and faintly contain pale pinks, purples or blues.

The construction is beautiful and the paintings are oddly compelling. They contain motion and mystery. Both exhibits are on to Feb. 10.