This Ithaca, N.Y., resident who earned his master's of fine arts degree at the University of Pennsylvania nine years ago has been trying to reinstate male and female dance partners as one of our most potent symbols of ongoing active relationships between two people. Bentley zeroes in on such relationships here by focusing on the "pas de deux," the steps partners take together that much of dance is about.

So focused is Bentley that, for him, painting is "the investigation of the dynamics of a relationship as played out through the motions and interactions of a couple." His show features plenty of dramatic movement into space, all seen from above and calling to mind very energetic dances such as swing and cha-cha along with emotionally intense interactions.

Shapes in these paintings evolve from intuitive, gestural brushstrokes that seem almost by accident to acquire mass and presence. Bright color and more often pale neutral tones are swathed into the spaces between and around each pair of dancers.

So, Bentley has developed a way of painting that expresses itself in purely aesthetic terms. Yet it's an art that also implies larger ambition to engage our interest in the relationship between art and life.

And it's about a personal search to create a kind of painting that puts greater and renewed emphasis on instinct, on subjective or emotional qualities, and on greater freedom of format.

Clearly for Bentley, the drama of a developing style will never replace the drama of life. Bravo.

Dolan/Maxwell

Featured here are a diverse dozen of its artists showing paintings and works on paper. Most are present-day regional artists, a few others active in the '30s.

Especially for viewers who are put off by going into an art "gallery" to view art and who also haven't been yet to Dolan/Maxwell, a very available alternative is the Grange setting.

A furniture showroom, it's not off-putting at all, if you don't mind wending your way among contemporary wooden furniture "handcrafted in France since 1904" to look at the wall-hung art.

Artists range from Radcliffe Bailey, Peter Brooke and Steven Ford to David Kelso, Harvey Quaytman and Cheryl Warrick. Even the Grange's showroom manager, Patrick Egan, is an artist.

Landscape show

In Sweeney's carefully studied pastels of scullers on the Schuylkill and the Delaware River, we most readily identify with the information these works give us. Almost as a participant as well as an observer, Sweeney portrays the lived experience of individual rowers and the healthy freshness of his expert use of pastel.

Martenson salts summer aspects of the local atmosphere along the Maine coast with a special blend of poignance in new oils painted in open air. He gives his exterior close-ups of an old house an achingly vulnerable and detached look, such pictures tending to have a lean, unadorned dignity.