ART REVIEW : Suggs Has Bemused Approach

Like a mad-cap alphabet gone out of control, Don Suggs’ compendium of black-and-white photo-based works chases after its referents and almost always ends up somewhere else. His nearly playful cataloguing of random symbols and arbitrary images seems to have traded the bitter sense of futility that governed his dry, unengaging paintings from four years ago for a more bemused, ironic appreciation of the vicissitudes of representation.

In 1989, also at L.A. Louver Gallery, Suggs showed stiffly painted landscapes and portraits partially obscured by rectangular blocks of color that often resembled and sometimes actually depicted national flags. Fixated on the inevitable frustrations caused by the duplicitous, unreliable nature of representation, these pieces argued that signs and symbols always take us further and further away from reality.

His new, photo-based works take up a contrary position. Although they also analyze the fact that meaning mutates as it moves through various channels of communication, they begin to intimate that this might be less of a problem than an opportunity. Suggs’ dense pictures, storybook-like arrangements of images, and pictographic constellations of objects revel in the realization that slight suggestions are sometimes more persuasive than tired, dogmatic assertions.

Titled “Old Genres,” his sprawling exhibition has the presence of a visual dictionary or encyclopedia that has been put through a blender and then cleaned up and carefully reconstructed according to barely intuited connections. Formal elements and pictures are repeated from one piece to the next, suggesting that the present arrangement is temporary and subject to further alterations. More flexible than previous pieces, this body of work anticipates even more supple rearrangements.

L.A. Louvre Gallery, 55 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Feb. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.