Santa Monica

Don Suggs’ new series of landscapes and portraits talk about mental roadblocks; signs and symbols that substitute for reality then become confused with reality.

Portraits are tightly cropped heads of famous political personalities, but faces are hidden behind their national flags. Strictly from hair styles and the country’s emblem we know who is being represented. Yet we are confronted by the awareness that we cannot see that individual, only the symbol of who or what they are--their country, their politics and, to some extent, the way they appear physically. Titles like “Big Capitalists” and “Big Communists” drive home the pigeonhole effect of classifications by which we codify ideas and people.

What is immediately clear from the portraits takes longer in Suggs’ landscapes. We are so accustomed to viewing painted nature as symbolic that we are less inclined to mix up the representation with the thing itself. In these pieces, the obstinacy of the abstract sign, blocking entry into the picture, serves to remind us that art itself is busy creating abstract realities that impede direct experience.

Also on view are stark black-and-orange etchings and woodcuts by German Expressionist Georg Baselitz. Covering 23 years of image-making, the work courts abstraction with various technically unsophisticated means until eventually settling comfortably into upside down figuration. Baselitz images are bold and graphic, stimulating as much for their use of dynamic line as the way their inverted subjects quickly cease to be an issue. (L.A. Louver, 77 Market St. and 55 N. Venice Blvd., to Oct. 21.)