Andrew Stevovich: a funny look at US myths

I believe I once described the painting of Andrew Stevovich, whose latest work may be seen at the Alpha Gallery, 121 Newbury Street, this month, as a cross between Pieter Breughel and Peter Arno. He is a sardonic wickedly-funny figurative artist who engineers a personal world out of the myths of the American scene.

His small, precisely-focused canvases with their linear abstractions and rich glazes cause one to look at them as one would look at a painting of a Flemish master; but the subjects are contemporary - a frieze of bettors at a dog track, an underwear clad man and woman perusing travel brochures in a drab motel, a customer, stogie clenched between his teeth, testing a bathtub like a porcelain coffin, while nervous salesmen glower.

They are absurd and ambiguous. They enact seedy social ceremonials whose true significance is veiled. The aging roues with deadpan girls, the priest clutching a parimutuel ticket, the king of rhythm and blues and his stage door bodyguards are observed with neutral precision. Stevovich does not caricature them: indeed his treatment of the formal aspects of painting implies that the important spaces between people possess a background of tradition.