VENICE

Two young New York artists swagger out West to show us what we already know--and darn little of that since each is represented by a skimpy half-dozen works. Philip Pocock makes large Cibachrome prints of run-down New York locales like brick apartment-house backsides and derelicts collapsed next to graffitied walls.

You have to look twice to see this because much of the image is covered up with lumpy abstract shapes of obscure origin. (Photographic reprinting makes it impossible to say if they started as paintings or chemical reactions induced in the darkroom). Anyway they do an artistically decent job of telling us about cancerously decaying cities but they also have badly underresolved problems on the borders between their photographic and artistic characters.

Louis Renzoni shows slurred serial-image paintings of such objects as faucets, light bulbs and vodka bottles executed by smearing one or two raw colors into black and white. Scanning the separate panels of each implies narratives about alienation and suicidal boredom. Unfortunately the substance of these slushy, carelessly painted images is so dispirited that the paintings lack the authority to maintain our attention. These paintings mumble self-pity. (Piezo Electric, 21 Market St. to June 21.)