Santa Monica

It was about time someone realized that universal price codes (UPC)--those thick-and-thin bar patterns read by laser scanners in retail stores--are really a sort of secret language as well as possibly the last, tongue-in-cheek word in Neo Geo. David French paints these linguistically opaque signs in various colors plus black and white. The gallery provides translations.

Assuming we believe what we are told--which in itself involves an examination of the trust implicit between art dealer and art public--the bars translate into specific references: to art (Duchamp, Mark Tansey), bitter political issues (Steven Biko’s death, U.S. relief efforts in Nicaragua) and the co-option of social issues by high culture.

Four Fiestaware plates bracketing a canvas with coded color bars superimposed on top of vertical blue stripes provide an easy lesson in UPC connoisseurship. The “text” translates as, “From the Collection of Andy Warhol.” But things get trickier. In “Collected by Christian Boltanski,” nine black and white photos of children--seemingly not quite the same size or vintage as the ones the French artist uses in his work--pair up with a canvas sporting the bizarrely doom-laden UPC-coded phrases, “eco-cannibalism” and “Mortgaged Milk and Cookies.”

What happens in French’s work is that a single painting becomes its own universe: both a symbol of consumer culture and its critique; a pure abstraction and the repository of specific meanings; a tangible object and an utterly opaque self-referential system. As is true in the rest of the insecure and insular world of art, power accrues to the viewer who claims to “understand” the work; everyone else is left out in the cold. That phenomenon, too, seems to offer a built-in chuckle for French, who has borrowed a language no human is expected to read. (Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica, to Dec. 31.)