La Cienega Area

Fear and (self-) loathing in Chicago are the subjects of Jim Lutes’ intense and fantastic paintings. Although this is his first local one-person show, viewers will remember his dark vision from the seventh annual “Awards in the Visual Arts” exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art last year.

Hugely swollen, distorted bodies with small piggy features and disembodied heads loom large in these works. A legless, pink blob with stumpy teeth skims above a spongy landscape in “Jogger No. 2.” In “The Cause of it All,” a bulbous pink face sags out of the night sky like a crazily out-of-joint moon, veering and leering down to a brightly lit city street.

“The Spot” seems to be a transitional piece for Lutes, in which he dumps out the contents of his emotional life for personal inspection. In this vast painting, a huge, distorted bubble with a tiny glowing center and a dense stew of imagery alights outside the dilapidated walls of his studio. The bubble, painted in a 360-degree rotation over the course of a year, contains such disparate ingredients as a big upholstered chair, a snow-capped mountain, a spread-legged nude woman and a face blowing a cloud of smoke.

The paintings bring to mind various references, from the orifice-fixated legacy of Surrealism and the contemporary Italian and German trans-avant-garde to the uncompromising self-scrutiny of Philip Guston’s late paintings. Essentially, this work takes a bitter views of a world of monstrous self-preoccupation and howling urban wilderness. Even the few seemingly neutral images--like “It Was in the Way,” a normal-looking man’s transparent head superimposed on a telephone pole-studded landscape--suggest an inability to see the world afresh, free of the burden of bitter awareness. (Michael Kohn, 313 N. Robertson Blvd., to Aug. 12.)