Can I restrict viewing artifacts based on role?

 Is there a way to restrict viewing artifacts based on role? For example we have several customer accounts accessing our tracing system. Each customer should be able to see only those items where he is selected as customer (a drop down field). We cannot create category and associate with team as it will create two many teams. We want to control by assigning role (customer A, Customer B, etc) to each user and when user logs in he will only see items where he is the customer. I understand how to restrict modify/edit. But is there a way to restrict viewing the item itself?