by Barry Schwabsky, New York Times (New Jersey edition), October 25, 1998

IN its earlier styles, art was generally meant to represent nature. But modern art, abstraction in particular, has often professed to embody its operations. Thus, Jackson Pollock's celebrated affirmation: ''I am nature!''

Today, with technological developments, from digital imaging to cloning, rendering the sense of both reality and its representation less stable and more fluid, artists like those in ''Unnatural Selection: The Transformation of Nature in Abstraction,'' at the Art Gallery at Raritan Valley Community College here, seem to want to hedge their bets. Abstract painting is once again attractive because it can be a little of each, both a representation of reality and a sample of its processes.

The curator, Tom McGlynn, speaks in the exhibition catalogue of the ''uncanny ability of paint to embody natural phenomena in its apparently chance directions and at the same time to present a 'picture' of that embodiment.'' In practice, what this means is that all nine artists practice a self-consciously mannerist form of abstraction, enamored of incongruities and paradoxes, full of references to both the abstract (and not-so-abstract) painting of the recent past and the more diffuse visual cultures of the present -- not only artistic, but commercial, scientific, and so on. The kind of thinking manifest in their works is widespread in today's painting, and while the artists included in ''Unnatural Selection'' are not necessarily the best or the best-known representatives of that thinking, they are valid ones. Mr. McGlynn, an adjunct instructor in fine arts at the college, has not stumbled in avoiding the most obvious choices.

For some of these painters, it seems that color is the primary means for sparking the dialogue (or showdown) between artifice and nature. In Carolanna Parlato's confections of poured and pushed acrylic, the lyrical abstraction of painters of the 1960s and '70s, like Jules Olitski, seems to be turning toxic. As the artist herself notes in the catalogue, it is the way ''murky and Day-Glo colors coagulate'' in discordant abutting passages that creates the paintings' science-fiction feeling -- a feeling pervasive in this exhibition, in fact. The acidic froth of Ms. Parlato's paintings suggests the gaseous surface of an uninhabitable planet.

Elsewhere, it is shape that becomes more important, as in Gary Petersen's paintings in which flat, simple, nondescript forms sprout bumps that can be seen either as exaggerations of normal features, like breasts or noses, or as malignant ones, like cysts or tumors. Taking a cue from the grotesque imagery of Philip Guston's late work, these are essentially cartoons of abstraction, although whether their stolid yet animated shapes should be seen as silly or menacing is kept ambiguous.

This idea of growth as pathological moves from the pictorial content of the painting, as in Mr. Petersen's work, to its physical conformation in a dark, untitled 24-inch square from 1997 by a Los Angeles-based Englishman, Jeremy Kidd, in which globular protuberances disturb the painting's normal planarity.

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A pedant might refer to Mr. Kidd's painting as a bas-relief, but a fully three-dimensional extension of painting is here in Madeleine Hatz's ''Desert Fluff'' (1998), a table-top agglomeration of pigments and various other materials, presented as a companion piece to her more conventionally pictorial ''Citrus Sfumato,'' also from 1998. The pieces are similar in palette, but where ''Citrus Sfumato'' is airy and light in feeling, ''Desert Fluff'' breaks that airiness down into something grainy, lunar, debrislike.

''What energizes a painting,'' Mr. McGlynn writes, ''is the painter's awareness of the constant struggle between the actual and the virtual.'' This play between reality and artifice has always been the artist's concern. Marianne Moore once called for poems that would be ''imaginary gardens with real toads in them.'' In Mr. Kidd's painting, possibly the strongest one here, I noticed a housefly frozen still on one of the lavish spills of clear resin that make up most of its immediate surface. Did the unlucky creature landed there while the stuff was still drying and been caught forever, like one of the cigarette butts Pollock is said to have tossed into his paintings now and then as he crouched over them, pouring paint and too caught up himself to stop? Or, given the general atmosphere of nature-as-illusion and artifice-as-natural, could the fly be a fake, like the ones in those trick ice cubes sold in novelty stores? After long minutes, when the seemingly immobilized fly insouciantly buzzed off and deflated these lucubrations, the line between art and reality only seemed blurrier.

''Unnatural Selection'' includes paintings by Bill Doherty, Kylie Heidenheimer, Giles Lyon, James Siena and Mr. McGlynn. Their work is generally a bit closer to familiar styles of abstract painting, whether based on geometry, on pattern or on gesture. Yet in each case there is some understated contradiction, a sense that painting, as Mr. Lyon puts it, ''is where . . . two paradigms meet.''

UNNATURAL SELECTION

The Art Gallery, Raritan Valley Community College, North Branch

Through Thursday. Hours: tomorrow, 3 to 8 P.M.; Tuesday, noon to 3 P.M.; Wednesday, 1 to 8 P.M.; Thursday, 12 to 3 P.M.

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