Wilshire Center

Jan Saudek’s grim, often grotesque photographs of flabby nudes have all the gritty, lustful sensuality of an old French postcard. It’s an association the artist helps along with a brown sepia tone and written notations on some of the images. But the dark and foreboding images of defiant young men and women posing in a desolate, peeling garret with a single small window signal the work’s subtle political underpinnings.

From the isolation and repression of communist Czechoslovakia, these are photographs of a population stripped down to its most vulnerable. Sometimes Saudek sees his people as a fat whore of faded glamour who wears an old Cesarean scar like a military honor. Sometimes he sees his country as a a divinely lovely but technologically distracted Odalisque listening to a Walkman.

These analogies between the vices and spirit of a nation and the sins and defiance of its people are compelling bits of stagecraft. They turn society into a weird circus and make its follies freakish. But they can also be absolutely stunning photographs. For sheer sensuousness it’s hard to beat the black-and-white close-up of wet lips holding a pregnant drop of water in “A Drop of Dew” or the cold power of “Metal Girl” that focuses on the sleek, steel blue back of a bald nude woman posed against the flower soft texture of a peeling yellow wall. As pictures and as political statements these images operate on more than one level, and knowing that makes them even more alluring. (Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., to June 24.).