ART REVIEW : ‘NEWCOMERS’ SHOW: GOOD YET GAUCHE

“Newcomers ‘85,” at the Municipal Art Gallery through Oct. 27, is not a perfect show. It isn’t supposed to be. It is part of an admired, decade-long program that accords recognition to worthy veteran artists, examines emerging local trends and insists that everything stand on its own feet artistically.

All 11 of the debutants on view are firmly upright, even if some of the postures are those of stalwart plebes prepared to take their first dose of professional castor oil.

Over all, the group has mastered the technical acrobatics and how-to manuals required to earn a turn in the spotlight. Now it’s time to notice crucial specters of sensibility and comfortable sleights of self-deception that must be exorcised before growth can continue.

Mark Stock, for example, paints zeppelins. They are wonderful icons, loaded with associations--from the elegant decadence of Germany between the wars to the tragedy of the Hindenburg. They bespeak both the weightless silence of futuristic fantasy and the lumpish bulk of cultural dinosaurs. The things are such obvious phallic symbols that they get beyond sexuality and you can’t decide if they’re ominous or funny. You can, however, decide that zeppelins are doing more for the artist than vice versa. Stock has to get on top of his subject matter.

Bill Gorton builds big, eccentric sculpture in the accents of Bay Area artists like William Wylie or Robert Arneson, but basically he lacks their slangy energy. There’s something sweet and thoughtful buried in Gorton’s work, but a wrongheaded attempt at swagger just makes the art look tentative.

Some work has flat-out problems. Richard Gerrish’s ceramic wall reliefs just don’t make their intentions clear. Sandra Martinez’s slightly fetishy leather-or-fabric wall hangings are materially thin.

More often, however, the artists drive you crazy by making very good art which they proceed to screw up with gauche moves.

Lorraine Zeyha’s goopy expressionist landscapes promise the manic energy of Die Bruecke but deliver dumb-cute. Christopher Schumaker commands a range of totemic sculpture from columnar to figural, but he can’t resist grating decorative surface elaboration and cloying titles like “Wham-Poof.” Time to get serious, folks.

Charlene Knowlton is the best pure painter on view--here as forceful as a wrestler’s body block, there as dartingly nervous as a lizard on a hot rock. Her abstract paintings are a joy, but she sticks the wrong foot forward in an oversize Neo-Ex clunker uneasily compounded of blown-up photos of tribesmen in ritual body makeup plus added painting and the odd palm frond. The only thing to praise in this attempt is Knowlton’s willingness to risk her talent.

The quality also shows in photographs by Don Gregory Anton. About half are shots of male nudes in settings as odd as a church. They are supposed to be about spiritual agony, but they are just embarrassing. All the same, they hint at psychological risk on Anton’s part and probably contribute to the integrity of more successful work. It captures the dark, encrusted, grotto-like Romanticism that stretches back from Edmund Teske through Rodin, Gustave Dore and Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment.” There is nothing original about Anton’s version of it, but it feels emotionally authentic.

So, for that matter, does Eduardo Oropeza’s color series, “Dia de Los Muertos.” It captures the garish, bizarre spirit of the Mexican holiday but leaves us wondering what world we are in. The photos look too doctored and collaged to have documentary authority and too artistically slipshod to make it as art.

Rebecca Newman’s combination of photography and drawing produces images of draped windows and Christo-like wrappings. They are elegantly tense but up close they appear brittle, and the seams between the mediums are uncomfortably obvious.

One of the few participants who doesn’t need a sharp change of mind or tactics is Lewis Desoto. He makes conceptual color photographs like “Wave System,” where a snaky line of fire erupts on a rocky beach, looking like some exotic but natural phenomenon. In fact, the works are setups, explained by Desoto in accompanying diagrams. Ideas and presentation need refinement, but this artist has found his thing.