Valentine From England

“Romantic” still works for Valentine’s Day, but the word tends to raise critical hackles when applied to contemporary art. Is it possible to produce lush, gestural, emotional paintings devoid of irony and still be taken seriously? In England, the answer is yes.

Though the U.K. is better known these days as the land of hot young artists who do everything but paint (Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Gillian Wearing), it is also known for a legacy of expressive painting by Stanley Spencer, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and others.

“Expressive” is actually a better word than “romantic” for the work in “Last Dreams of the Millennium: The Reemergence of British Romantic Painting” at Cal State Fullerton’s Main Art Gallery.

Most of the seven painters in this show, organized by the Stephen Solovy Art Foundation in Chicago, combine a fresh approach with a rootedness in painting traditions and an emotionalism that rings true. It’s a pity, though, that none of the promising younger women painters in England were included alongside these men in their 40s and 50s.

The most keenly contemporary of this lot is Tony Bevan. His drawn and painted male portraits from the early ‘90s--the bitter aftermath of the Thatcher decade that produced much highly charged art, literature and theater--exude a nervous intensity. Black, wiry lines etch individual strands of hair on a head, giving them the stagy, street-smart look of tattoos. A nervous scrawl delineates the furrows and shadows on a face seemingly struggling to speak.

Even the outline of a sleeve or the pattern on a shirt fairly twitch with uneasy energy. Bevan’s “Self Portrait” bristles with a cocky, self-contained ferocity, an attitude expressed not only by the tilt of his head but also by the slash of a breastbone, the peculiar little dents on his skin and the sharp angles of three skinny forelocks.

Simon Edmondson’s work is unabashedly emotional, an approach that is freshest when harnessed to a more unusual visual scheme, as in the haunting “A Hundred Ardent Lovers Fell Into Eternal Sleep” from 1987.

This large canvas is crowded with heads--some comparatively detailed, some rendered as dark blobs--that press above a mysterious loving couple in the lower right corner. Edmondson’s flickering patches of dark and light, echoing the tenebrous styles of El Greco and Oskar Kokoschka, create the ambience in which these romantic ghosts dwell.

John Virtue’s ink-and-acrylic work (which, like Bevan’s, has been shown during the past decade at L.A Louver in Venice) seems to have reached a high-water point in his ever-more-abstracted evocation of the rawness of a primal landscape under siege. Zigzagging or slanting lines variously call to mind lurching dead trees, thunderbolts and fissures in the earth.

In Virtue’s “Landscape No. 322,” from 1996-97, a spume of drips and spatters and chunks of white paint on black energize the canvas with an out-sized, Lear-like view of nature: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! / You cataracts and hurricanes . . .”

The elemental aspect of Hughie O’Donoghue’s work is quite different. Whatever their titles (“Fires,” “Bruise”), his paintings are fundamentally about the materiality of paint--its color, texture and density. In a more intimate scale, these qualities might emerge to better effect, unfettered by the theatrical demands of a large-scale vision.

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Banality swamps Ian McKeever’s work. His recent abstract “Hartgrove Painting No. 5”--layers of ribbonlike vertical blue strokes--is a tepid, dated contrivance, and the spray of pale colors that cuts through his 1985 landscape “Old Trees-Brown”--presumably an abstracted view of sunlight glimpsed through trees--has a prettified, illustrational quality.

Bruce McLean is the odd man out in this lineup. His triptych, “Big Night Out on Frankfurter Strasse”--from 1982, when German Neo-Expressionism was still riding high--evokes a coked-out club scene with sketchy clonelike figures touching fingers to their noses. Electric green outlines and splashy red bodies lend a pop panache.

Then again, David Olivant is by far the most eccentric of the artists in the show. In the huge drawing, “Time Laid Bare” from 1982, he adds his own fillip to a history of symbolic and narrative art that begins in the Renaissance and culminates in the densely allegorical, angular paintings of Max Beckmann. This latter-day orgy of intertwined figures and objects--tools, gears, giant globes--has the apocalyptic overtones of vintage science fiction.

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In recent years, Olivant reinvented himself by removing the obvious content from the work yet retaining his marvelous sense of vitality and rhythm. The gossamer writhing and falling forms in “Untitled No. 10,” a large charcoal drawing, flicker through the shifting light and dark patches of shallow space.

Olivant has also written the exhibition catalog essay, which is both a good and bad thing. His outlook is steeped in an intense understanding and appreciation of technique, but he seems rather ill at ease in writing about his cohorts, and he devotes excessive zeal to condemning more forward-looking styles of contemporary art.

* “Last Dreams of the Millennium: The Reemergence of British Romantic Painting” appears through March 12 at the Main Art Gallery, Cal State Fullerton, 800 N. State College Blvd. Hours: noon-4 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday; 3-7 p.m. Wednesday; 2-5 p.m. Sunday. Suggested donation: $3. (714) 278-2037.