Venice

British painter Tony Bevan looks back in anger at the socioeconomic underside of the Thatcher era in a strong series of stylized, linear portraits and self-portraits. An aura of tense submission to unseen, brutal forces pervades many of these works. In several images, the artist’s head is turned to one side to reveal an array of red and black markings. They read variously as strands of hair, arteries or wounds--mementos of the everyday violence of the streets.

In portraits of line-ups of twitching, slack-jawed young men, Bevan carries on the anecdotal strain of the British figurative tradition with streamlined vigor. At his telegraphic best he obsessively deconstructs portions of the human anatomy--feet, hands, heads--to reveal the damages and depravities of contemporary society.

In “Head, Leg and Red Table,” an extended bare leg gashed by a long stroke of red paint shares a table with a man’s head, flung back to reveal its ritualistic pattern of red arteries. Such images are presented on coolly stylized, non-descriptive grounds of bright powdered pigment that collects in little ripples, as if washed up by an invisible tide.

Most devastating is the large painting called “Fork,” in which a hand holding a fork emerges out of the spare geometry of a maroon-and-red field. One is conscious of the way the fingers are tucked in, the slabs of fingernail and the awful meat-like hunk of forearm squashed against the table edge. This is man as consumer and devourer, greedy flesh disconnected from mind and soul. Even the fork throws a bizarrely menacing shadow. (L.A. Louver, 55 N. Venice Blvd. and 77 Market St., Venice, to Nov. 25)