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By Dan Leone

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ROBERT HARTMAN'S AERIAL photographs hardly look like landscapes. A lot of them don't even look like photos. Shooting from the cockpit of his 1949 Piper Clipper airplane, he uses special heat-sensitive infrared film to capture images of the terrain a thousand feet below. Full of vibrant magentas, oranges, and reds, his prints are practically abstract and look more like something squashed under a microscope slide than any landscape you've ever seen. Hartman, a longtime East Bay resident, especially loves the Delta region – Antioch, Rio Vista, Pittsburgh – partly because of its wild and always changing patterns of land, water, and vegetation, and partly because of its pollution. It's not that he enjoys toxic waste, mind you, but it does make some pretty patterns on the infrared film. The scene in Valley Illuminations, he recalls, was totally nondescript to the naked eye. The print, however, revealed something resembling an explosion of biotic petri-dish life, bursting with colors and patterns and practically screaming an announcement of its toxicity, like a jungle bug whose brilliant markings serve as a warning to potential predators: "Don't eat me! I'm poisonous!" Although Hartman certainly cares about the environment, his pictures are more painterly than political. The Oakland Museum of California exhibit, "Solo Flights: The Aerial Photographs of Robert Hartman," features only his recent infrared work, but the Triangle Gallery show, "Robert Hartman Retrospective: 25 Years of Aerial Photographs," includes many earlier aerial photos taken with conventional film, and even a few of his abstract expressionist paintings from the 1960s. It's easy to see the influence of painting on Hartman's photography, but what's even more interesting is how his abstract paintings hint at his lifelong passion for flying. "Solo Flights" Wed.-Sat., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun., noon-5 p.m., 1000 Oak, Oakl. $6 adults, $4 students and seniors. (510) 238-2200. "Robert Hartman Retrospective" Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m., 47 Kearny, S.F. (415) 392-1686. (Lindsey Westbrook)