The challenge for a contemporary representational artist living in troubled times is to bear witness convincingly within one's own personal style.

Vera Klement recently did it in drawings combined with photographs. Susanna Coffey now does it through self-portrait paintings.

Coffey's recent work at the Maya Polsky Gallery is not at all different in style from the work she has pursued for years, yet within the framework of a continuing artistic examination of the self she has found a way of addressing a larger world perspective.

She does it by situating head-and-shoulders self-portraits at the center, bottom, of landscapes of holocaust. None of the images is specific beyond the portraits, yet any viewer in the United States will grasp that they are "about" our most recent war. All of them, including one done with the patterns of camouflage, are atmosphere pieces in which the artist turns back and sometimes closes her eyes. They're not political in the currently approved sense, but they are nonetheless harrowing and beautifully counterpointed by isolated small canvases of flowers.

War and peace. that's the theme of the exhibition in work that accuses no one yet seems as powerful an indictment as we are likely to see this season. It even has a moral for younger artists: Look at the world, be yourself.