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