Downtown

The work of a young, talented British painter David Austen defies certain precepts of “high” art. The works are deceptively simple. Parred shapes suggesting eggs, cocoons, even genitals are painted with an Old Master attention to edge and surface luminosity. These float in the center of unusually small canvases.

“Girl’s Heart” is a small swollen almond form, its edges worked to make it vibrate haplessly in the middle of a cobalt green expanse. The artist says the picture is about “love and silence” and though nowhere in the work do we see either of those spelled out, it exudes an edgy longing. Diminutive in size, Austen’s works trash the unspoken equation between large scale and important work and also set aside the notion that serious artists must chose between figuration or abstraction.

“Men Without Skin,” hovers between both. In a biting-red field glazed to a sheen Austen places the jagged suggestion of a vulnerable figure whose head and torso look as if they were made by the surrealist method of ripping paper and co-opting those accidental shapes with the most subconscious resonance. Austen’s technical depth comes through in the realistic “Pear,” which could be a detail from a Dutch still-life or a powerful symbol of masculine fecundity. Austen’s work balks at description because its potency is between the lines; if there is any common denominator, it is an air of sultry, life affirming sexuality. (Cirrus Gallery, 542 S. Alameda to Dec. 2).