SANTA MONICA

Ciro Beltran Hidalgo is a native of Chile where he works as a teacher to support his ambitions as an artist. You’d hardly guess his origins from a quick look at his work which is very much in the International Modernist tradition. Painting on paper mounted on illustration board that also serves as a frame, Hidalgo delineates figures with coarse, dark lines, then fills in the blanks with passages of intensely saturated primary color. Surfaces are thoroughly worked--lots of scraping, scratching and scumbling--and they have a soft, fluid look. An artist’s statement describes the work as preoccupied with ecology and militarism in his native country, but Hidalgo disguises his political concerns almost too well; his highly sophisticated abstracted nudes smack of Francis Bacon and Matisse, and hardly evoke the plight of the downtrodden. (James Turcotte Gallery, 3517 W. Sixth St., to Nov. 30.)