Santa Monica

David True began making figurative art right at the tail end of the “what-you-see-is-what-you-see” anti-psychological abstraction of the mid ‘70s. He was included in the Whitney’s “New Image Painting” show with folks like Nicolas Africano and Susan Rothenberg who rescued the figure from Minimalism and all its restrained abstract offshoots.

Since then True has consistently come up with eerie recycled images from nature--deer, whales, foxes--culled and tooled more for their psychological content than representational accuracy. In earlier works images seemed blurred as if submerged in primordial slush. In this sample of smallish works from ’88 and ‘89, True returns to uninflected, hallucinatory clarity.

As usual, his Sierra Club excursions don’t take place outdoors, but in the recesses of True’s subconscious, where bow-bellied, voluptuous elk wade in purple slivers or blade boats pierce silent waters. The key to True’s staying power is that he’s as concerned with loaded allegory as with sensuous, purely formal surface. Playing one against the other, “Clear Intent” is a stark archetypal vessel trapped in methodically agitated blue. Some of the images of nature are so crisp and fresh-frozen they ring cold. But in “New Day” and “Working Back,” where astringent little winged men clad only in their briefs toil fervently, True cuts to the core of human vulnerability. (BlumHelman, 916 Colorado Ave., to March 25.)