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