'What Is Between Us'
Through Jan. 25, Peres Projects

CHRIS BALLANTYNE'S LANDSCAPES seem almost normal at first, until you start to notice little things – a car door left open by someone who just left the scene, a tree that's been chopped but hasn't fallen yet. Not even a breath of air stirs, but it's clear that people have been there and left, their business strangely unfinished. Ballantyne has a very Dr. Seuss-like predilection for simple colors, cartoonish shapes, and underpopulated, alien-seeming terrain. Many of his paintings look at the world from a dramatically precarious point of view, calling our attention to various kinds of disjunctions and disruptions in land, water, fences, and pipes. While 1,2,3; Container, Space, Volume, for instance, appears to be an ordinary suburban yard, a closer look shows that there are two holes in the ground and only one pile of dirt. Taking the title into account, it might be better understood not as a conventional landscape but as a symbolic diagram of before and after, or a map of here and there. Ballantyne echoes 1,2,3, on the opposite side of the room, where he has painted a matching but much bigger set of ditches directly on the gallery wall, thereby giving us the feeling of being both outside and inside the picture frame. He does this again elsewhere in the gallery, where a real-life ramp-and-ledge installation echoes a framed drawing of an identical ramp and ledge. Life is imitating art – or maybe it's just art imitating art – but in either case, we can't help wondering if all of Ballantyne's drawings and paintings might be intended as schematics for actual three-dimensional constructions. Given the unsettling nature of his paintings, those real-life projects would be very interesting indeed. Wed.-Sat., noon-6 p.m., and by appointment, 1800 Bryant, Suite 210, S.F. (415) 861-2692. (Lindsey Westbrook)