Marc du Plantier is a French artist now living in Mexico City. This is his first Los Angeles show. Accustomed as we are to a surfeit of cleverness, his sculptures and paintings are, at first, disarmingly simple. Wall in Mexico, Burning City, and a series of fantasies on the space theme––Spatial Geology, From Outer Space––the simple titles belie a deep interest in the essential images of the New Realism. The sculptures use mineral sources, bronze, gemstones, mica. They are static, totemic, with emphasis on shape, texture, and relief, without developing volumes. The paintings also rely on relief and dimension, not through breaking the surface or building up with paint or collage, but by a preliminary working in under-layers before the painting proper. Movement is implicit in the paintings; the sculptures exist in space but do not create new space. The works fuse subjective content with objective method toward a synthesis, a newly defined reality.
—Joan Hugo
