Galleries: Paintings that offer both allure and depth

The colors, shades, and halftone prints that make up Tom Benson's modestly scaled, mostly monochromatic paintings are so appealing - even magnetic - that it's easy to appreciate them simply for that. The British artist's scarlet, lemon yellow, black, indigo, pale pink, and white paintings and black-and-white halftone prints in ink and paint seem to hover in the spartan whiteness of Larry Becker Contemporary Art.

But Benson's paintings are also intended to prompt a deeper examination of themselves, such as the ways in which his works are affected by changing light conditions; their paint application; the density of pigment (or pigments) in a particular hue; and the nature of the work's support (Benson paints on aluminum panels, aluminum-and-mahogany panels, and acetate). Look carefully, and the paintings change according to your changing perception of them.

The gallery has three small books on hand that were published to accompany past Benson exhibitions; they explain his choices and uses of various pigments, and it's well worth asking to look at them for their detailed explanation of his practice. Then again, the works speak quite eloquently for themselves.

As with Benson's paintings, nothing can be taken for granted in Gallery Joe's "Formulation: Xylor Jane, Serge Onnen, Lynne Woods Turner, Will Yackulic." The four artists share an interest in geometric structure and take it in intriguingly different directions.

From a distance, for example, the rainbow-hued, colored-pencil drawings by Jane look like geometric studies of grids and multi-rayed circles incorporating numbers, but in fact they represent her own particular charting of time, acting as a kind of personal graph or calendar.

And the materials and processes by which Yackulic creates his drawings of otherworldly landscapes populated by flying geodesic domes and images of architectonic forms composed of multiple markings are by no means obvious. Besides drawing, his pieces combine silver leaf and ink-jet prints of aluminum with such techniques as screen printing and burning.

Turner's delicate pencil drawings of geometric forms mark her most recent explorations of magic squares as a means to contemplate balance.

A memorably nightmarish, Hitchcockian combination of rampant, insatiable consumerism and geometry, Onnen's Tirelier, a phenaticoscope animation (a single rotating drawing that suggests movement), shows a man's face "moving" in a spiral with gold coins seeming to drop into his eyes and mouth.

The Fleisher Art Memorial's first Challenge exhibition of the fall season is subtler than most previous Challenge shows, partly because none of its three artists' works incorporate video or audio components, but mainly because their contributions seem born of a quiet, methodical purposefulness. It's not a bad thing, individually - each artist has something interesting to say - but the overall effect of these three together had me wishing for a diversion.

Sharka Brod Hyland's large ink drawings take over the first gallery with ease, their images of curiously lumpen, mountainlike shapes reminiscent of the late Philip Guston and Trenton Doyle Hancock's more recent "Mound" figures. The fact that they're made up of myriad adjoining quadrangles makes the drawings' scale more impressive, and the irregularities in Hyland's obsessive patterning keep them from being a puritanical exercise.

Keiko Miyamori displays her collected objects in much the same manner that Hyland draws. Tsunagu-Wall is made up of about 4,000 clear plastic boxes containing fragments of brick, concrete, and metal that Miyamori retrieved from the roots of an uprooted tree at a Philadelphia construction site, as well as objects sent to her by people all over the world in exchange for her objects. Miyamori's Tsunagu-Books displays 600 books borrowed from her friends, each with a second protective cover made from a frottage of one of 600 trees. But her Tsunagu-Root, of debris from a tree's roots embedded in a resin cube, ostensibly the simplest of these works, is the most effective. (A larger version is on display outdoors at Shelly Electric Inc., 12th and Callowhill Streets).

The jewelry objects of Joshua Ryan DeMonte are frankly amazing and not a little scary; they accomplish precisely what DeMonte intends, too, defining "architectural space around the body, altering our perception of the figure." Whether or not you can imagine yourself wearing one of his enormous, swooping architectural forms is beside the point. It's easy to imagine clinging desperately to one of his balconies.