Wilshire Center

Robust, thick featured Mexican women arrange their shawls, make tortillas and tend to wee ones in lithographs and a few paintings and drawings by French artist Jean Charlot. Once a professional draftsman, Charlot turned technical control and keen observational skills into a strange figuration, pulling from the primitive strains in Picasso and the Mexican muralists. Charlot went to live in Mexico in the early ‘20s and began wielding pigment as if it were stone. He built facial features from shadowed, angular planes to depict lumbering earth-bound figures that have the feel of heavy pre-Columbian statuary. From the “done it all and seen it all” perspective of the late ‘80s, Charlot can look maudlin and rehashed, but if we remember that the artist forged his style when primitive experiments were the risky exception to the rule, we can appreciate his raw sincerity. (Tobey Moss Gallery, 7321 Beverly Blvd., to Jan. 9.)