Romanian artist  Mircea Cantor seems to enjoy ratcheting up the stress levels of his audiences.

During a tour of his first solo show in Canada, at the Rennie Collection at Wing Sang, the 2011 Prix Marcel Duchamp winner stopped in front of one of his most famous video works, Deeparture. It features a wolf and a deer pacing and eyeing one another in a white-walled empty room.

Anyone who watches the video will likely be mesmerized by the artist’s close-ups of the animals’ eyes and the deer’s neck, wondering if at any point the wolf will lunge and tear the other creature to shreds.

“This was my first solo show in New York in 2005,” Cantor, 37, told the Straight. “It was like a strong step on the American ground to say that’s my statement. It’s talking about tension.”

Cantor’s show attracted a huge crowd at its opening on November 8. Museum owner Bob Rennie quipped to the Straight that the image of the wolf and the deer circling around the room reminded him of the dance that sometimes takes place between artists and collectors.

Deeparture was just one of many works that seemed to enthrall visitors to Rennie’s historic Chinatown building that evening. Don’t Judge, filter, shoot is an installation featuring 30 wooden sieves in different meshes, each riddled with what appear to be bullet holes.

“It’s like an invitation to impersonal violence,” Cantor explained.

He revealed that the shape was inspired by the discovery of a virtually two-dimensional form of carbon called graphene by Nobel laureates Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. A dozen of the smallest meshed circles in Don’t Judge, filter, shoot include images of the zodiac.

Designed as a series of hexagons, there's a mathematical precision to the piece that reflects the artist's abiding interest in the subject.

In fact, he declared that the exhibition is modelled on the golden ratio.

"I think everything can be drawn to numbers," he said. "It's a language in itself."

Cantor has had his works featured at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, London’s Tate Modern, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was born and raised in the Romanian city of Cluj and now divides his time between there and Paris.

Another video in the show, The Landscape is Changing, is designed to twist people's view of public protests. Filmed in the Albanian capital of Tirana on a sunny day, the 2004 work shows a crowd of people holding up mirrors rather than placards bearing statements, which are then edited in unusual ways against the backdrop of the city.

Cantor said that during the Communist era, people would hold peaceful marches carrying signs supporting the regime. After he moved to France, he noticed that the demonstrations in Paris were often against the government, but again, the protesters would display slogans.

He mused about what would happen if G8 or G20 demonstrators dispensed with antigovernment messages and merely held up mirrors.

"What is the media going to feel?" Cantor asked. "They will feel their own image. We should go in the streets with mirrors. It's our reality."

Another commentary on the 21st century is Rosace, which is a huge hanging sculpture in the shape of a stained-glass window that you might see in a Parisian church. On close inspection, however, it's made of soda cans, which Cantor purchased from a street vendor.

Another piece, Chaplet, 2007–2014, features what appears to be a long string of barbed wire. In fact, it was created by the artist's thumb prints, which were applied to a 12.8-metre wall.

"I like this idea of the artist's body as a limit," he said. "Because now all of this technology penetrates your life—biometrics, genetics—therefore, what's supposed to be your intimacy is no longer your intimacy....Now, everybody can have my fingerprints."

Cantor's unusual take on the world is also reflected in the more recent video, Wind Orchestra, which shows a child repeatedly standing three knives in sequence on their handles on a table and then blowing them down.

The use of knives, rather than dominoes, is another way in which Cantor has injected tension.

Perhaps the most challenging work of all is Double Heads Matches, which includes two components. There's a small display case holding wooden matches with phosphorous material on both ends. Then there's a video showing in painstaking detail how these double-ended matches were created in a factory in Romania.

Cantor created Double Heads Matches in his mid 20s, shooting close-ups of everything that takes place on the factory floor. He admitted to the Straight that it took a fair amount of time to find a factory that would allow him to do this, after having failed to secure locations in France and Belgium.

Even though much of Cantor's work has an ominous theme, he's not without a sense of humour. The first thing that greets visitors to the exhibition is a brown coffin with a slot to drop in a coin.

Nearby on the wall, a message urges people to smile.

The overall impression is that as you lighten yourself of material wealth, you just might lighten your mood at the same time.

Mircea Cantor: Collected Works is at the Rennie Collection at Wing Sang until March 28, 2015.