Galleries: Exegesis of exurban landscape, big-box architecture

Pentimenti Gallery regular Steven Baris continues to study and interpret the elasticity and ambiguity of the exurban landscape and its big-box architecture in his recent geometric paintings on canvas and Mylar, and his painted Plexiglas wall sculptures. In particular, his large oil paintings on canvas, showing diagrammatic outlines floating in milky atmospheres, express the banality and soullessness of the exurbs.

Baris also has created an installation for the gallery's Project Room, "Exurban Archipelago," that includes a video of a distribution center that appears to have been shot by Baris through the windows of a moving car; it captures the facility's anonymous contours to a T.

Baris' work is nicely complemented by Kim Beck's large graphite drawings, in which she reorganizes the typical suburban and exurban landscape into complex compositions with cutouts. Her surprising, often humorous, juxtapositions of landscape and architecture zap all the ordinariness out of the everyday.

LG Tripp continues to expand its horizons with solo shows of artists who've never previously exhibited with the gallery, this time pairing Pottstown artist Mike Hale with Philadelphia artist Patricia Ingersoll.

Hale paints his large, mostly black-and-white paintings with rollers, and works on horizontal or vertical wood panels, the combined effect of which lends his paintings the look of photographs and silk-screens. His handsome horizontal paintings, among them Impulse, of repeated black images on a white background, bring various Warhol silk-screen series to mind, as well as the pop artist's films.

In some of his paintings, Hale seems too concerned with wringing the most out of everything - abstraction, suggestions of landscape, technique, and myriad painterly effects are all literally rolled into one - when less visual drama would do.

Ingersoll's paintings on paper suggest abstractions of landscapes and cityscapes hovering in space. Ingersoll would seem to be initially setting herself limits - almost all her paintings have a faint graphite square drawn in their centers - but her colorful lines inevitably exceed their boundaries. She also uses much the same palette in this particular body of work, but the changing relationships of her blues, blacks, oranges, and greens on white backgrounds play up the sense of movement she's clearly after (her paintings have such titles as Soaring, Flow, Agitation, and Breezes). Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell would approve.

The much-lauded Philadelphia-based illustrator Earl B. Lewis has the entire Rosenfeld Gallery to himself this month. The front of the gallery showcases Lewis' recent foray into icon paintings, while the back is given over to his representational watercolors, many of which have been reproduced in books.

Each of Lewis' "Lotto Icons" depicts a tiny portrait of a child within a large frame that has been perfectly distressed to give it a patina of age. A closer look reveals that Lewis has made his watercolor portraits on real Lotto tickets, painted them with gold leaf, and then scratched the gold surface to partially reveal the face beneath it.

His point - that some parents waste their money on Lotto tickets instead of investing in their children - isn't immediately obvious, either, and that's good. However, the sameness of the work as it's displayed here can give it too much of a "special project" look.

Lewis' watercolors of South Carolina's low country, children, and other subjects, on the other hand, are the works of a master.