Zimmer, William; FELLOWSHIP WINNERS AT NABISCO GALLERY, The New York Times, March 18, 1984
EAST HANOVER WORKS by 26 artists who received ''first-priority ranking'' among 90 winners of the 1984 Visual Art Fellowships awarded by the State Council on the Arts are on view at Nabisco Inc.'s USA Gallery through March 28.
Such a competition, involving diverse media and styles, is well suited to the gallery, which is essentially the bright and capacious lobby of Nabisco's corporate headquarters.
There is no solemnity about the place. It resembles a hotel lobby or airline terminal, and must be traversed by anyone doing business at Nabisco.
There is no way to quarrel with the council's selections because one has no access to the work of the more than 400 fellowship applicants, but fault can be found with the scant information provided a visitor.
There is no biographical information on the exhibitors; since part of the interest in a show like this is sociological, this is an acute omission.
For better or worse, one detects a quota system at work, as if the judges took pains to admit a certain amount of crafts, visionary plans or abstract painting among the representational ones, but then it might be argued that it is essential to represent the breadth of art in New Jersey.
Also, this reviewer secretly delights in being faced with an amorphous presentation and charged with making conclusions or discovering an unknown artist who is a good candidate for real success.
It often has been observed that photography in New Jersey is practiced with unusual commitment. William Aranowicz makes one care about some neglected places and, especially, about advertising from bygone eras. His ''Girl in First Communion Gown in Perth Amboy, N.J.'' harkens back to some of the heroic photographs of the Depression.
Joseph Paduono has a unique printing technique that makes his photographs, mostly of resorts on the Jersey Shore, look like silverpoint etchings and thus nostalgic. Geanna Merola's photographs are not purebred; there are many drawn elements mixed in with photographed ones, but, as is often the case, innovative technique does not hold its own against banal subject matter.
Neo-Expressionism, which is currently giving artists everywhere license to paint gesturally (which is often translated into carelessly), has some adherents in this show. They are not bad, although with Alison Gordon Weld it is her unusual support - shower curtains - that holds our attention more than her imagery.
Celia Parker's paintings are likable for the way her brush stroke becomes the swirls of liquid in crude pastel- colored renderings of tea, coffee and cafe con leche being prepared in outsized cups.
To be sure, Neo-Expressionism does not always involve gestural paintings. Folk or naive styles find a place, too. Elio Beltran can impressively shift scale from a panoramic crowd scene in ''Cabildo en la Loma'' to the near surreality of ''Transitions,'' in which a man contemplates a dead bird in a cage that overhangs a railroad yard. This painting has both political and personal overtones that cannot be precisely defined.
The most astute abstract painting here is by Gail Buono. In ''Garden State Memory'' and ''Night Driver,'' she pares the landscape down to the highway and reproduces in abstract terms the sensation that a driver peripherally experiences.
Kaare Rafoss's ''Junction Relief,'' which employs white industrial tile and colors out of Matisse, is very fine, but dullness infects the abstractions of Hiroshi Murata and Peter A. Stroud. However, it must be conceded that, at a distance, Mr. Murata's insistant grid system acquires a jauntiness that allows the bright colors he employs to spring to life.
Much of the work in this exhibition belongs to the ''show me'' category. This is work that depends heavily on novelty, and, on rare occasions, novelty enriches art in genuine ways.
However, the tall, wooden lotus flower that grows out of a piece of furniture that Kenneth Ray Fisher calls a ''swamp cabinet'' would only be a nuisance to anyone using the cabinet.
The concrete sculpture of Clyde Lynds has hair-thin cracks and some kind of lighting system. The hefty gray of the sculpture is lightened by the threads of illumination that result.
Mr. Lynds's ''Hotel du Nord for Cornell,'' made of optical fibers, is a massive starry backdrop against which one might imagine Joseph Cornell placing some poignant imagery.
The closer that Patricia Lay's plans for sight sculptures come to real embodiment, the more they communicate to the viewer. Her drawn plans are either unreadable or too technical, but the sleek, curving models in wood, plaster and gouache make us hope that some day the real, full-scale thing might be experienced.
Debra Weir has borrowed a medium that delights children, the pop-out book, and adapted it to some paper sculptures that have power because of their ability to collapse and lie low or to rise up in demonstration of their verve.
The ''pi ece de resistance'' of the entire exhibition is Bob Eustace's work. His paintings are tableaux that take place in a format like a shallow pan.
The heroes are the myriad of small toy figures collected by children. Mr. Eustace constructs wonderful settings for them, and puts the figures to visionary use that mediates between the whimsical and the obsessionally bizarre.
Mr. Eustace's titles, among them ''The Altar of Heaven/The New Jerusalem,'' ''The 12th Hour'' and ''Peter's Vision at Joppa,'' hint that he is deadly serious about his work. But if Mr. Eustace is bound for glory as an artist, he should realize that making paintings is not his forte.
His two large acrylic canvasses fall far below the tableaux. However, imperfection is not fatal in an exhibition such as this; rather, it adds salt.
