La Cienega Area

David Ligare, painter of Greek myths and toga-clad youths, is doing landscapes. These are large, realistic, pastoral scenes that dwarf his classic, ennobled figures. Yet built on the same strict structural formulas, the landscapes retain the timeless, perfectly ordered sense of placidity of his earlier history paintings.

Ligare’s scenes are of pastoral rolling hills dotted with ruins and natural rock archways carved with Latin mottoes. They are painted with the artist’s usual sock-it-to-’em realism that comes loaded with metaphoric significance.

In many ways these landscape images are more accessible than earlier work. It’s hard to miss the glowing fertility of the farmed land in “In Praise of Italy” and the death-defying determination of a felled olive tree sending up a leafy shoot in “Incrementum Novum.” What could be a revival of Nicholas Poussin’s “ideal landscape” actually manages to clarify the historic symbols the artist includes.

Ligare bathes his landscapes and small enigmatic still-life paintings in the sharp, slanting sunlight of late afternoon. A combination of intense light and tight realism lends delight in the sheen of satin ribbon wound around a craggy stack of gray stones. Paintings like “Purgatorio” heighten lifes intensity and must be seen as metaphors for clear vision.

Ligare’s art challenges the viewer. Until now a great part of the dare was to catch the historical references that informed each piece. The shift of focus to the strictly ordered landscape makes an even more effective staging area for philosophic rumination. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to Nov. 26.)