Between Waking & Sleep

Just out of the Navy, John Hultberg in 1947 enrolled in San Francisco's California School of Fine Arts, and it seemed that artistically there was only one course for him to steer. Abstractionism was the powerful new movement, and some of its most famous practitioners--notably Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko--were his teachers. Hultberg has nothing but admiration for these men--but purely abstract painting was not for him.

As he proves in his latest one-man show at Manhattan's Martha Jackson Gallery. Hultberg has developed a way of painting that places him in the ranks of today's artistic funambulists, who walk the tightrope between schools. Quickly glimpsed, his paintings seem abstract; on inspection they turn out to be landscapes in which windows, doors, bits of floor, ship or building fill up the foreground while behind them stretches an endless sea. a distant city, a darkened wasteland. His titles-Death and Transfiguration, Edge of a City, At the Border-are slapped on afterward. The surrealist finds themes in the subconscious; Hultberg gets his ideas "from the preconscious-the half-remembered, half-conscious things you see just before you fall asleep or wake up."

As a kind of bridge between reality and dreams, Hultberg exaggerates perspective. The eye no sooner lights upon some familiar surface--a deck, a dock, a piece of roof-than it is drawn through some sudden opening, whisked up a ladder or a plank, flipped into space. Occasionally a whole painting is made up of windows, each with a separate world behind it. The shadowy figures lurking here or there are merely spectators: ''They put the viewer into the picture."

In the five or six years since Hultberg began getting attention and placing work in important collections and museums, his painting has changed only slowly. His colors-bottle greens, cobalt blues, neon reds--still flash out from this recess or that like glints on a prism. But color now interests Hultberg less than composition, and in composition he is moving more and more toward humanistic painting. "I want to put the human being in a setting," he says, "in a landscape, but equal to the landscape." Hultberg is his own frankest critic. He finds that his paintings are of a world more dead than alive, and he wants to get ''a style serviceable for life."

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