Toward A Mummified Sublime Using black glop, Donald Sultan produces gloomy elegance

By ROBERT HUGHES

The trouble with the exhibition of the work of Donald Sultan, which opened at the Brooklyn Museum recently after a seven-month run in other American museums, is its date. It should have begun in 1997. Then there would be a larger oeuvre to assess, a longer career to discuss, and not just a bright reputation to inflect.

Sultan was born in Asheville, N.C., in 1951 and is certainly among the more gifted American artists of his generation. But this show's catalog hums with inflated comparisons and claims. "He seems formed in the Manet mold," writes one contributor, Ian Dunlop, adducing by way of proof that Sultan, like the great Edouard, is ambitious, paints images from "modern life," looks at old master paintings, etc. Sultan does have a crush on Manet; a small still life with asparagus pays homage to Manet's famous single asparagus stalk, and a little detail of masts and sails in Manet's Moonlight over Boulogne Harbor, 1869, is blown up to an 8-ft. square in Sultan's Harbor July 6, 1984. But there is, to put it mildly, a wee gap on the scale of talent between Sultan and his lucky predecessor.

Another catalog eulogist, Lynne Warren, noting Sultan's commitment to formal painting and his commendable lack of interest in grabbing quotes from visual mass media, winds up with the startling claim that "his works are meditations on the possibilities of transcendent meaning for an audience that has forgotten . . . how to believe." Aw, come on. There is nothing "transcendent" about Sultan's work. It is decorative and materialistic. Most of its motifs come from photographs, not direct observation; its style is distanced and gloomily elegant, enlivened by discreet erotic puns between, for instance, lemons and breasts.

Much of the character, and indeed the strength, of Sultan's paintings lies in their odd, slightly fetishistic technique. He works on square plywood panels, faced with Masonite and then covered with ordinary vinyl tiles. Over these goes a thick coat of black glop -- industrial butyl rubber, used by roofers. Once this tarry skin is dry, Sultan cuts and blowtorches his design into it, filling in white patches with plaster and enriching the whole with color. The seams of the tiles and panels impose a grid on the image, a ghost memory of the minimalist grids that pervaded American art in the '70s, when Sultan was a student.

This laborious process favors contour and flatness, light-and-dark contrast rather than color, and the single iconic shape. Sultan does decoratively what an older American artist like Robert Moskowitz does grandly: by taking a familiar shape and rescaling it, mainly as profile -- one still life of an egg and three lemons on a plate is also 8 ft. square -- he slows up recognition and provokes, in the more successful paintings, a sense of strangeness.

This scheme gets in the way when, instead of simple, flat images, he tackles scenes with a deeper space. In a painting like Battery May 5, 1986 -- black, smudgy figures on a promenade in lower Manhattan, a plunging perspective of lamps on the seawall, a livid yellow sky -- the recession is brusquely contradicted by the surface grid of vinyl tiles; the image struggles to break back from the picture plane but cannot. It is a self-canceling effect but not an interestingly perverse one.

In other paintings of fires, abandoned industrial plants and refineries belching out their pollutants under a Stygian sky, the emotive content of the image (industry as Pandemonium) is at odds with the stolid execution. Few techniques could be less suited to depicting what is fugitive and mobile, like fire and smoke, than cutting silhouettes from roofing tar. Sultan leans toward the mummified sublime. His stage effects of glare and silhouette descend, remotely, from Turner. But he is so used to thinking in terms of figure and ground that he handles the transitions between them -- the midtones, the modulations of light -- clumsily at best.

The area of Sultan's work that seems unequivocally successful is his drawings -- big, densely worked silhouettes of tulips and lemons, with so much charcoal ground into the paper over repeated layers of fixative that its blackness is velvety and palpable, with something of the richness of Jasper Johns' encaustic or Richard Serra's paintstick drawings. Sultan is highly sensitive to the play of black and white. In drawings like Black Tulip May 23, 1983, he gives his shapes an admirable, embodied decisiveness: you sense that they have all been the subject of hard aesthetic argument. The tulip stems swoon like Margot Fonteyn's neck; the leaves fairly crackle with graphic energy. At times in the configuration of one of Sultan's flowers, one sees a sly reference to Matisse's odalisques.

Sultan's instinct for pattern could have degenerated into a formula by now, especially given the market demand for his drawings, but it shows no sign of doing so -- though the small still-life paintings are perhaps another matter. Within his limitations, he is certainly an artist to watch.