British Painter Tony Bevan has not shown in Los Angeles since 1998, and at that time, viewers encountered large figurative paintings mired in bloody shadows and depictions of gnarled hands and forks. Now, Bevan crops the personalities of his figures and populates the gallery with large architectural paintings of rooms, stripped towers, and heads etched in lines. The show immediately recalls the troubled, matted flesh of Leon Golub and the knifed split figures of Francis Bacon, but Bevan perhaps owes the most to color fielders like Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, making environmental scale and formal, tectonic divisions of space his dominate aim.

Bevan could have very easily gotten political with this work, but ultimately avoids overt references to push formal relationships. For this reason, his crumbling towers, wrecked rooms, and basket weaved heads do not proclaim injustice but instead haunt the space, asking your sensations to respond to the aesthetic stimulus they present. Much of the presence of the works comes from their surface. Bevan grinds his own pigment and rubs this chalky substance along with shards of charcoal using the nub of a brush. The canvases are tactile, warm, and dusty, and carved in this desert are masses and forms that ask you to spend time letting them work on you.                             

                



(*Images, from top to bottom:  Tony Bevan, Tony Bevan, October 20 - November 24, 2007; L.A. Louver, Table Top, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 63 1/2 x 83 1/4 in, Courtesy of L.A. Louver.  Tony Bevan, Tony Bevan, October 20 - November 24, 2007; L.A. Louver, Head and Neck, 2007, acrylic and charcoal on paper, 48 x 34 in, Courtesy of L.A. Louver. Tony Bevan, Tony Bevan, October 20 - November 24, 2007; L.A. Louver, Corridor, 2006, charcoal and acrylic on paper, 47 3/4 x 33 3/4 in, Courtesy of L.A. Louver.)

- Ed Schad