Brazen color and grizzled personages populate Hunter’s first West Coast exhibition. Presently on a Fulbright in Florence, the painter studied at Claremont. His avowed theme is The Human Comedy, but since Balzac could hardly be blamed for such cardboard characterizations, the painter’s allusions must be personal or literal esoterisms. Among these barbarously ugly paintings, French Gloves displays a flaccid female segmented by her clothing into striped legs and arms, the nude yellow torso is garroted by a red dog collar, a pencil fillip provides the belly-button. Hunter’s straight from the tube colors, spatula application and gleefully gross patterning gyrate Fauvistically, but he is merely crying “wolf,” not being one.
—Rosalind G. Wholden
