CITY of London artist Brian Plummer may spend six months a year in his Yorkshire Dales studio but Landscape Dissected is only the third Yorkshire exhibition of his 38-year career.

Adze Gallery director David Durham first took a shine shine to Plummer's geological landscapes at the Royal Academy Summer Show three years ago, and was struck by his distinctively analytical style once more on spotting another Plummer in the summer at the Royal Academy this year.

"I instinctively knew it was a Brian Plummer work without looking at the artist details," recalls Durham. Always a good sign of distinction.

Durham duly contacted the 69-year-old Londoner, who invited him to his barn studio in Horton, Ribblesdale, a studio that is the fulcrum of a 30-year association with Yorkshire founded on Plummer's passion for the Dales and Pennine landscapes. Despite that fervour, however, his only previous shows in God's own country were at the Manor House Gallery in 1969 and Lynton Court Gallery 18 years ago.

Yet such is his standing that eight of the 22 paintings were sold at the Adze Gallery exhibition preview. Predominantly a selection of newly painted Dales landscapes, complemented by studies of Majorca, these are works that stand out from the crowd, literally.

Where Howard Hodgkin can't contain his love of colour to the extent that he paints the frame too, Plummer goes one stage further, his large-scale constructions in acrylic paint stretching beyond the boundaries of the base board. It is like pulling out a section of an Ordnance & Survey map to show the relief in more detail.

Where others may paint in 2D, Plummer's geometric constructions present a 3D perspective like a sculptor, and where conventional landscape artists present only surface, Plummer travels below and also fills the sky with meteorological detail.

He depicts not only the physical landscape as it is now but the geological history that forged the landscape and the climactic conditions that prevail. In the Majorca pieces, for example, the intense reds suggest volcanic eruptions, while the strips of wood in the Dales paintings suggest tectonic plates and earth movement.

While these sectional, multi-layered paintings are formal, precise and scientific - as if Plummer were dissecting an animal - they still evoke life, not of the inhabitants of the landscape but the past and present of the landscape itself.

Adze Gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday, 11am to 5pm; admission is free. Plummer's works are for sale from £350 to £2,000.

Updated: 09:29 Wednesday, October 15, 2003