A historical record that tends to contain blots and erasures

Todd Gray’s midcareer retrospective at Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Gallery opens on a startlingly confrontational note: with a life-sized color photograph of a slender, nude, black, male body, smeared with what looks like shaving cream, his face covered with the taxidermic head of a fang-baring boar mounted to the surface of the photograph like a hunting trophy.

Framed in the doorway of the gallery, glassy black eyes fixed in the viewer’s direction, the figure suggests both guard and maitre d’: It’s not clear whether he intends to keep us out or lead us in. He’s daunting yet captivating, fierce yet disarmingly still. There’s an air of violence about him -- Gray is clearly playing on stereotypes of black masculinity -- but also something magical, almost shamanistic.

Created in 2004, the work makes a fitting frontispiece, synthesizing many of Gray’s principal themes into one singularly potent image.

Other works in the show date to the early 1980s, and nearly all revolve around a body of some kind -- whether human, animal or toy -- or else, in certain landscape photographs, around the conspicuous absence of a body. Although his presentation is refined and often quite beautiful, Gray’s interest in the subject is clearly less aesthetic than political: The emphasis is not how these bodies look but what they mean.

In “Beauty Boar,” the opening piece, as well as in three other photographs from the same series that feature similar images without animal parts (all 2003-04), the body is Gray’s own and engaged in what looks like a private, ritualistic performance -- a symbolic struggle with whiteness. These are spare, even simplistic, but deeply evocative works.

The lumpy white foam, violently applied, suggests a grotesque form of whiteface. Although a substance generally associated with hygiene and cleanliness -- the ironic but largely ambiguous title of the exhibition is “Immaculate” -- it gives the impression of sullying the artist’s smooth dark skin, as mud might sully a paler complexion. In works that include his face, the foam obscures his features, as if on the verge of smothering him, although his stance remains agile and energetic.

The two earliest works in the show -- mixed media posters produced as street art and mounted around L.A. during the 1984 summer Olympics (the versions included are reproductions) -- portray a similar struggle in less abstract terms, matching the bodies of black athletes with anonymous symbols of corporate power. In one, the thick, muscular figure of a boxer drives his fist into a sleek, modernist skyscraper that appears at the same scale. The other portrays a boxer at the end of his swing, the rubble of a demolished building in his wake.

The period that follows appears to have been one of experimentation, in which we find Gray fragmenting, disassembling or scribbling over black-and-white photographs of black bodies with text and other images. Though scattered with striking details, these are transitional works at best, lacking the dynamism of the boxer pieces and the rigorous focus that distinguishes later work.

In the mid-1990s, Gray moved away from the human body to produce his most iconic series: large, soft-focus, black-and-white photographs of silhouetted toys. Some assume explicitly sexual positions; others loom like ominous little dictators. All exude an air of uncharacteristic shadiness implying a vein of corruption at the heart of consumer capitalism. The analysis doesn’t go much further, which may have been why Gray didn’t pursue the series for more than a few years, but they’re sound, handsome works for what they are.

In 2000, Gray made the first of several trips to Europe and undertook another stylistic shift, this time into large-scale, color photographs marked by a decidedly German influence. Here, the human body enters in again, this time integrated into a contemporary urban landscape and, for the most part, racially indeterminate.

The most notable through line -- Gray’s stamp on an otherwise familiar model -- is a subtle sense of physical or social precariousness. One photograph, depicting a man lying facedown in the middle of a public lawn (sleeping? drunk? dead?) has been turned on its side so that the man, whose hold on reality appears none too stable to begin with, looks as though he might slide down the lawn and out of the picture. Another, called “Monk,” portrays the broad figure of a hunched, dark-skinned, darkly clad man in a brightly lighted library, suggesting a vast black hole in the center of a crisp, fluorescent white world.

The unpopulated scenes are equally unsteady: Another image of a library interior is tipped on its side to become a confusing mass of bars and glass resembling nothing so much as a prison corridor; an image of an outdoor swimming pool is turned upside down, so that the reflection of patio furniture in the water, now right side up, seems more real than the furniture itself.

The most recent works in the show -- “Beauty Boar” and three free-standing sculptures also involving taxidermic animals -- draw this precariousness into the space of the gallery. In each of the sculptures, an animal associated with colonization and the building of the California missions (a pig, a sheep and a buffalo) is bisected with a large, tilting plywood panel bearing a mirror or a photograph of one of the missions. The pig’s snout, for example, juts through the center of one of the altars, suggesting a dirty secret (namely the forced labor of indigenous people) beneath the church’s gilt grandeur.

The physical presence of the animals is fascinating and unnerving. As in “Beauty Boar” and the other self-portraits, Gray’s intention seems to be to make the conceptual issues at play -- racial struggle, the inequity of power, slavery, oppression -- as visceral and undeniable as possible while retaining the sense of mystery that distinguishes art from argument. After 20 years of shifting through strategies, this recent work feels energetic and refined, an indication of good things to come.

‘Todd Gray: Immaculate’

Where: The Harriet and Charles Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Cal State L.A., 51 State University Drive, Los Angeles

When: Noon to 5 p.m.

Mondays through Thursdays and Saturdays

Ends: Jan. 29

Price: Free

Contact: (323) 343-6610, www.

luckmanfineartscomplex.org