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.

12 to 5 p.m. Saturdays. www.pentimenti.com or 215-625-9990. Through March 3.

Two, new

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.