Seeing Red with cartoon canvases

Who exactly is the elusive figure in the paintings of American artist Carroll Dunham? And what, if anything, does he represent? In his neat fedora, pale blue shirt and conservative suit, his rigid figure is assembled as a set of geometric lines filled in with a bright palette.

Popping up against brilliant red backdrops at strange angles, his sometimes barely visible head sprouting phallic protuberances, he more than hints at something unsavoury, aggressively sexual and generally rather unappealing.

He is perhaps too specific in his attire for an American Everyman and too neatly dressed for some seedy dime store-lurking loner. So you wonder what social commentary Dunham is offering on the familiar theme of the malignancy of American culture.

There appear to be few cultural clues at hand to guide us, yet one immediately thinks of Philip Guston's bubble-gum pink, variously potatoheaded, variously hooded, figures. But in this series of Red Space paintings there is nothing as bovinely dumb about Dunham's own besuited, sharp-angled cartoon guy.

Elsewhere, there is a change of mood and style. Mule, for instance, depicts a strange hermaphrodite figure, sickly pink of hue and more fluidly painted, and here the Guston influence becomes stylistically apparent.

But rather than being too strictly absorbed by matters of meaning and content, Dunham's concerns appear, above all, to be formal ones: the tension between geometric abstraction and figuration is explored with energy and vigour in these curiously elusive, attractive canvases.

Until Dec 9, White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square, N1, Tue to Sat 10am to 6pm, free. Tel: 020 7930 5373. www.whitecube.com Tube: Old Street

Carroll Dunham
White Cube
Hoxton Square, N1 6PB