Wilshire Center

The bars in Tijuana’s red light district are the vibrant haunts depicted in Raul Guerrero’s newest series of paintings. These are not pretty pictures, nor are they moralist tracts. Instead Guerrero treats the sad and often sordid scenes with the same detached complicity that marked Toulouse-Lautrec’s depictions of Paris nightclubs.

Each painting is a dark, Fauve colored, affecting drama of steeply tilting planes and rudimentary drawing where artifice takes on a life of its own. His vaguely Matisse-like figures have the florescent green, orange or purple skin of bodies continually washed in neon and booze. The hyper-unreal color and the artist’s willingness not to gloss over the subject’s underlying flaws gives the scenes their edge. It’s a raw thread captured in the faces with closed eyes in “Dancers: Bar Resbalon,” a vivid portrait of escapism. Guerrero’s acceptance of these people and this nightshade world grants haunting humanity to the soulful woman at the bar in “Coco Club” even as it regards the drunk collapsed among empty beer bottles in “Borracho en el Ancla” as a fact of life. (Saxon-Lee Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., to Nov. 25.)