Painters Bailey Doogan, Holly Roberts And Chris Rush Show At Etherton Gallery. By Margaret Regan IT'S BEEN 15 years, give or take, since a band of expressive narrative painters from Italy invaded New York and galvanized an astonished art world into a new interest in the art of the human figure. And in this brave new world of post-abstraction, post-conceptualism, post-a-lot-of-things, artists continue to come up with new ways to envision our too, too solid flesh. Over at Etherton Gallery, three contemporary painters provide three widely divergent interpretations. None of the three--old hands Bailey Doogan and Holly Roberts, and newcomer Chris Rush--paints the standard Beaux Arts version of the body. Rush, until now known mostly as a street artist and pop muralist, reprises his familiar simplified baby heads floating in space and tries his hand at the full human figure in some neo-realistic oils. New Mexico artist Roberts continues to paint lush oils on top of silverprint photographs, allowing only hints of the photographed bodies below--an eye, an arm, a chest--to seep through to the upper layer of primitive stick figures she paints on top. Of the three, Doogan, a painting prof at the UA, comes closest to the old art-school view of the painted human body. Still, she makes her own modernist changes. Doogan usually puts her carefully modeled bodies in a flat, modern space, and she challenges the old art idealizations that required every body to be young, muscular and in its prime. In her meticulous oils on linen, Doogan lovingly paints the crevices that time etches into human flesh. Most often her figures are older women, but on this outing Doogan has selected a naked male figure that she repeats in three different media. In each, work, he's in the same convoluted position, rolled up into a ball, his head coming out between his legs, a pose that can best be described as having his head up his you-know-what. Doogan takes a humorous view of his situation, putting him beneath the text of Lewis Carroll's poem, "You Are Old Father William" in a linoprint, and allowing him to ignore a telephone beside him in the oil "The Call." But in its third rendition, the one in charcoal on paper, the comical figure metamorphoses into transcendence. He's nowhere in space now, and a luminous light shines on his vulnerable, twisted body. Drawn monumentally, he's a compassionate emblem of human aging. Sometimes Doogan abandons her classical re-visions altogether and heads into surrealism. A disembodied head and leg poke out of a cart set in an imaginary landscape in "Vista Vision II," a 1997 oil on paper. In "Land Scape I," a 1996 oil on linen, a conventionally majestic landscape is backed by a beige mountain that, on close inspection, reveals itself to be two giant heads. Here the serious Doogan breaks out of the sober palette of flesh and maroon and gray she typically limits herself to in her body works, indulging instead in bright lime and pink and yellow. And if her figure paintings are re-workings of Old Master ideas, the half-dozen colorful little landscapes are humorous forays into the territory of such 18th-century artists as Gainsborough. "Landscape IV," 1997, even has the obligatory faithful dog. Roberts, another Etherton regular, also goes on some art-historical travels. Her stick figure humans owe much to ancient Indian art of the Southwest, those simple line drawings of people, animals and abstract symbols chipped into rock. And like those drawings, Roberts' figures have a quiet power, a psychological density made even more compelling by her technique of layering photos and painting. Like early Native American artists, Roberts uses animals to indicate spirit worlds and psychological states, conjuring up haunting beings that are half-animal, half-human, like the deer man in "Deer with Sticks," or the man in the belly of the bird in "Crow with Man Inside." In the new suite of 19 works, Roberts often investigates the relationships in the human family, picturing a battling couple inside a simply drawn house in "Couple with Yellow House" and in the more elaborate "Couple with Roses." In the latter, the distraught man is painted with his hands across his chest. A lovely black-and-white photo of a man's clenched hands, from the under layer, protrudes through, at once rupturing the conventional plane of painting and vividly conveying the complexity of our inner lives. Roberts' paints, beautifully pooled on top of the impermeable photographic paper, are a sumptuous mix of earthy colors, ranging from pink-gray to blue-gray, shot with flashes of yellow or red. Newcomer Rush, having his first big gallery show, manages to hold his own with the more accomplished Roberts and Doogan, though his paint applications do not yet have their richness. In fact, his series of five gouache paintings on board, like his street art, owes a little too much to the flat conventions of poster and advertising art for my taste. More interesting, and more surprising, coming from the creator of the late baby mural, Laugh, Fly, Eat Cake (it used to be on the wall north of the Etherton parking lot) are his new oil paintings on masonite. Abandoning the flat spaces of the gouache works, Rush tries his hand at illusionistic painterly space, in the neorealistic "The Lawn," which pictures a ring of frolicking young boys, and in "The Virgin," a bit of a beefcake picture of a beautiful young man asleep. But in the best of the bunch, "The End of Modernism," Rush abandons the figure altogether. He only suggests a human presence by depicting a lowly bathroom which he faithfully records, peeling paint, chipping tiles and all. Its conservative realism is not exactly fashionable, but it's heartfelt nonetheless. Works by Bailey Doogan, Holly Roberts and Chris Rush continue through March 29 at Etherton Gallery, 135 S. Sixth Ave. The gallery is open from noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, with extended hours until 7 p.m. Thursdays, and from 7 to 10 p.m. on Downtown Saturday Nights, the first and third Saturdays of the month. For more information call 624-7370.

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