The title given to this show, “For Consenting Eyes Only . . . ,” appeared in the gallery’s back room on a cabinet door behind which was a painting Roger Brown calls Boy Startled while Jerking-Off in the Woods, or What’s the Use of Beating around the Bush?, 1985. What, indeed? Although Brown may have thought of this provocative painting as the core of his show, as the painting’s placement suggested, my interest lay elsewhere.

The fact is that I tend to locate Brown himself not in the bushes this painting contains. Rather, the gesture most characteristic of his work for me, its spiritual center,

The roisterous theatrics of Paul LaMantia’s paintings and drawings have linked him with Chicago’s imagists for nearly 20 years. His obsessively elaborated compositions assault viewers with bewildering arrays of frenzied sexual gymnastics in highly patterned, claustrophobic spaces rendered in sulphurous yellows, neon blues, and ominous reds. Sharing something of Peter Saul’s amiable perversity and Richard Lindner’s menacing elegance, LaMantia’s pictures are rougher and more textural than either.

This show of recent works is full of luscious textures and a surprisingly subdued palette. The cloistered

The title given to this show, “For Consenting Eyes Only . . . ,” appeared in the gallery’s back room on a cabinet door behind which was a painting Roger Brown calls Boy Startled while Jerking-Off in the Woods, or What’s the Use of Beating around the Bush?, 1985. What, indeed? Although Brown may have thought of this provocative painting as the core of his show, as the painting’s placement suggested, my interest lay elsewhere.

The fact is that I tend to locate Brown himself not in the bushes this painting contains. Rather, the gesture most characteristic of his work for me, its spiritual center,

The roisterous theatrics of Paul LaMantia’s paintings and drawings have linked him with Chicago’s imagists for nearly 20 years. His obsessively elaborated compositions assault viewers with bewildering arrays of frenzied sexual gymnastics in highly patterned, claustrophobic spaces rendered in sulphurous yellows, neon blues, and ominous reds. Sharing something of Peter Saul’s amiable perversity and Richard Lindner’s menacing elegance, LaMantia’s pictures are rougher and more textural than either.

This show of recent works is full of luscious textures and a surprisingly subdued palette. The cloistered