Santa Monica

For nearly 25 years San Franciscan Manuel Neri has been a respected Bay Area figurative sculptor and teacher. He set out to become an electrical engineer, but ended up almost by accident at the California School of Fine Arts where cross currents between Bay Area figuration and Abstract Expressionism forged the style we’ve come to recognize.

Neri shows predictable but engaging, near life-size white plaster figures of nude women. His technique still involves lumping abbreviated clumps of plaster over plastic foam and metal armatures, building fragile-limbed, tensile females with no particular facial features and sketchy but svelte anatomy. Neri “finds” the figure while he works, much as an action painter might. He gouges, scores, obliterates and exaggerates figures, hacking off an appendage or attenuating detail with bright swaths of industrial paint for results that are at once classical and funky.

Here nudes are set before flat backdrops; one handsome piece positions a spectral female in a profile stance before a thick wood slab splattered with black and green paint. In two similar works cast in bronze, painted accents aren’t surface fluff; they bind the metal figure to metal backdrop, creating the feel of matter emerging from a flat field, much like the spectral painted figures of fellow Bay Area artist Nathan Oliveira.

If this sounds like Neri is a frustrated painter making stiff drawings in space, forget it. An acrobatic nude in-the-round who props her supine yellow body above the floor on spindly graceful arms has convincing weight and tension. Neri may be an instinctual draftsman, but his foremost interest is in sensual, telling volumes moving through space. The show is filled out with several drawings and a suite of plaster maquettes. (James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St., to Nov. 27.)