Wilshire Center

Naked bodies tumbling helplessly through space or caught in strict confinement are the psychological equivalent of modern man in Belgian artist Jan Vanriet’s latest paintings. Figures like the arching male nude plummeting toward jagged rooftops and the sobbing Odalisque draped over a surreal factory/prison of creativity link vulnerability to a world of conflicting demands and expectations.

Vanriet’s figures are potent. Rendered in quick, secure lines of paint or charcoal, they can radiate emotion like the fiery female entombed in her bath or coolly intellectualize, like the pasty-faced man with his hands in his pockets in “Struggle and Caress.” The compositions consist of a spare amalgam of personalized symbols tumbled together to form a dream- like, social-realist type of imagery. Flags and factories, leather belts and prison bars hint at political idealism going sour.

The artist’s technical skill gives this art with a heavy message a broader appeal than David Salle’s awkward figuration, although it mines some of the same ground of isolation and Angst . It is, however, less obscure, clearly projecting a brooding world of cause and effect where radio towers broadcast messages of anxiety and ghosts haunting the shadows are seen in the wave of a flag. (Wenger Gallery, 828 N. La Brea Ave., to Nov. 29.)