Surrealist stranger in a strange land

The surrealism of Dutch artist Teun Hocks is as concise as a good joke and warmly humanistic. In the eight large painted photographs that make up his exhibition at Fahey/Klein Gallery, he posits himself -- usually dressed in a paper pusher’s coat and tie -- as a lone wanderer in an absurd world, confronting a succession of Sisyphean dilemmas with weary perseverance.

In one, he’s standing in a forest holding a kayak paddle and staring down at a fallen tree trunk, presumably contemplating how to transform it -- without tools, materials or instructions -- into a boat. In another, he’s on a piece of ice, adrift in an endless sea, watching helplessly as his hat, briefcase and umbrella float away from him in three directions.

Evenly suspended between the naturalism of photography and the fabrication of painting, the works have a visual ambiguity that suggests the realm of a fable. The landscapes are archetypal to the point of being fantastic -- much like early cinematic backdrops -- and the composition of each scenario is shrewdly economical, with no one element feeling extraneous or capricious.

The real delight of the work lies in the fact that all of these scenarios, however ambiguous in their particulars, are rooted in familiar emotions. One -- which depicts Hocks contemplating a placid river while painting, on the canvas that sits beside him, the image of a tempestuous ocean -- touches on the bewilderment we all must feel at one time or another contemplating the disconnect between our inner selves and the outside world.

Another -- which finds the artist on a ramshackle treadmill in the middle of a sweltering desert, his steps simultaneously raising his body temperature and driving the feeble operation of a tiny fan propped up ostensibly to cool him -- describes the ironic futility prevalent in gyms and corporate workplaces throughout the contemporary world.

The photographs of Rodney Smith, on view alongside Hocks’, also deal in the absurd, with appealing if somewhat less profound results.

Shot in a crisp, skillful black and white, these images present handsome landscapes strewn with stylish idiosyncrasies. A woman’s shoulders and smart black hat form the tip of a tall, cone-shaped rock formation that emerges from a pool of swirling surf. A dapper man in garden-party white stands on stilts in the middle of a misty country road. A couple perches coolly on a pair of A-shaped ladders above the geometric lines of a vineyard, the woman’s voluminous skirt forming a perfect black triangle beneath her, and the man raising a wineglass.

Smith’s characters -- with their vaguely historical attire and droll, aristocratic attitudes -- are an amusingly chic lot, something like the cast of an E.M. Forster novel run through the mill of Vogue magazine. The men tend toward that most endearing of literary archetypes, the eccentric English gentleman (one leaps down a path waving a butterfly net; another stands at a wall with his head fully inserted into its curtain of ivy, bowler held casually behind his back), while the women evince a sort of continental glamour, slinking through the countryside in off-the-shoulder dresses and dramatically contoured hats.

Substance is most definitely in thrall to style here: There’s little indication that we should read these setups as anything but quirky gestures of the artist’s imagination. It’s quite possible, furthermore, that the pictures would strike a deeper chord -- something more keenly poetic -- were Smith to reduce his reliance on glamour, particularly insofar as his women are concerned.

Taken on their own level, however, as products of their own particular logic, the pictures are strewn with memorable glimpses -- a top-hatted man staring down at another from high in an enormous old tree; a beautiful woman standing alone in a canoe in a swamp, fake butterflies bobbing from her hat; ballerinas perching on tall stone columns like birds -- and remain eminently enjoyable.

Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 934-2250, through Aug. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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An appreciation of the day-to-day

The charms of Billy Sullivan’s current exhibition at Regen Projects are akin to those of a long, lazy summer afternoon.

His handling of paint is loose and casual, his compositions are breezy and his palette is irresistibly cheerful. His choice of subjects -- still lifes and portraits derived from his own snapshots -- is merrily quotidian and reflects an appreciation of life’s simpler pleasures: a walk on the beach, a jar of flowers, an affectionate dog.

Given how sweltering our own recent afternoons have been, this joie de vivre is refreshing. Particularly pleasant are two floral still lifes in which the subtle but keen intelligence of Sullivan’s color play, well honed over the course of a 30-year career, really comes to the fore.

The prominent appearance of a Matisse monograph in the larger of these works (probably the most accomplished painting in the show) is clearly no accident: The spirit of that artist dominates these interiors and pervades the other works as well.

Unfortunately, however, enthusiastic color isn’t enough to redeem Sullivan’s flat, amateurish treatment of the figure -- a treatment that clearly stems from his reliance on snapshots and may well be conscious but that has become something of a cliche these days and leaves his subjects looking anonymous and inconsequential.

The one instance in which the dynamics of Sullivan’s color do lend a notable, if somewhat unnerving, potency to the figure is a portrait of a nude, fair-skinned woman in what looks like a hotel room, drinking eagerly from a half pint of milk. A delicate ensemble of pale pink and gold, the image is so suggestively creamy as to seem almost lurid. I’m not sure whether I like the painting or not -- I can’t tell whether Sullivan is being playful or sardonic in his portrayal of femininity -- but it’s weird enough to be compelling and full-bodied enough to inspire curiosity about this particular woman, which is more than can be said of the others.

Regen Projects, 633 N. Almont Drive, Los Angeles, (310) 276-5424, through Aug. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Contemplating the suffering of war

There are as many possible points of view toward a war as there are individuals to observe it, as current headlines continually demonstrate. War’s basic physical components, however, are indisputable: There is always land; there are always weapons; and there are always bodies -- alive or dead, whole or mutilated, adult or child, soldier or civilian.

When documented photographically, these elements speak across cultures, nationalities and time periods, often overwhelming specific analysis or propaganda.

That is to say, when you encounter the image of a woman bent in grief over one of many sprawling, lifeless men scattered across a barren plain, the fact that she’s Russian is likely to matter far less to your conception of the situation than the fact that she’s human.

This sense of universality pervades an outstanding exhibition now at Stephen Cohen Gallery of World War II photographs by Soviet photojournalist Dmitri Baltermants (1912-1990), which in fact includes just such a picture.

While the nearly four dozen photographs assembled here do convey a great deal about the Russian perspective and about conditions specific to the Eastern Front, what is perhaps more striking is their familiarity.

A master craftsman, even at this early stage in his career, Baltermants captured not only the events of the war but its underlying emotional currents: pride, grief, determination, fear, courage. Though not especially candid, particularly compared with much American war photography -- Baltermants emphasized not the individual but the collective experience -- the images leave you with an acute sense of the soldiers’ humanity and their relationship to the severe but enduring landscape.

The Soviet Union was, of course, our ally in World War II, and it’s worth wondering whether we would feel the same sense of recognition confronted with images by an official German photographer. There are certainly factors that would make such an identification more problematic, but a human body is a human body beneath the insignia of its uniform; without recognition of that simple fact, we’re doomed to repeat the atrocities Baltermants catalogs here.

Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7358 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 937-5525, through Aug. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Cross-cultural lessons in design

An exhibition at Daniel Weinberg Gallery of paintings made on sheets of pounded bark by Mbuti Pygmy women of the Ituri forest in the Congo, though entirely stripped of cultural context, offers an intriguing testament to the seemingly universal instinct for mark making.

Created in the 1970s, largely as decorative items of clothing, the paintings contain a fascinating variety of intricate, free-form designs, each stretching across a given panel like doodles across a student’s notebook cover. These designs are loose, abstract and (according to a book available for perusal at the front desk) not symbolic; rather they meander spontaneously, acquiring visual logic and rhythm as they go.

Intriguingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, the designs look much like the drawings of many younger artists today. Whether the similarity stems from direct co-optation or some cosmic overlap is impossible to tell (it’s probably some combination of both). The sheer vitality these works generate, however, makes it easy to understand what the younger artists are reaching for.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 954-8425, through Aug. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.