Donald Sultan: THE NATURE OF THINGS

Donald Sultan

THE NATURE OF THINGS September 8 — October 22, 2022

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CULTIVATING ARTIFICE Tom Loughman

Encountering Donald Sultan’s Mimosa works in the artist’s studio over the past four years, I have been struck by how they are evolving through different expressive modes. These paintings and drawings share some quintessential traits of Sultan’s approach to abstraction: the active juxtaposition of rough and slick materials, his preference to create immersive fields of experience rather than objects in space, and a general fidelity to the golden ratio format. The markers of his aesthetic and techniques abound; the work is instantly recognizable as his. Yet this newest series shows Sultan’s appetite for abstract invention as he puts his subject through its paces. In terse visual shorthand and limited palette, each work echoes in its own manner the experience of a dense forest of mimosas dancing in the breeze—sometimes just budding and, more recently, raucously abloom. They entrance with the way they riff in varying degrees of lushness and density. Color and materials distinguish each work as an additive step in his exploration. The result—achieved through a sensitive process, recognizable upon close observation—is both playful and analytically rooted. Confident and fresh, these new works reveal Sultan moving through his Mimosa series with disciplined rhythm and critical rigor.

Something different is coming alive in Sultan’s latest explorations of this leitmotif. Each work strives for simplicity of line, color, and composition.

Emerging from lyrical and precise underdrawing, their surfaces are realized with the quotidian industrial materials typical of Sultan’s production. They are multi-layered, but can be mistaken as visually flat from a distance. The early Mimosa pictures from 2018 and 2019 reprised these canonical Sultan paradoxes in their materiality and effect. They kept traces of representation and played that realism off against an aggressive anti-illusionism. For example, Cézannelike swatches of blue could pop in the background, suggesting a glimpse of sky.

Multiple layers of green foliage—often mottled dark and light hues—perpetuated the messy mark-making of the earliest conté drawings in the series. Their rough surface noise can be seen as a nod to nature [see Mixed Berries Aug 5 2021]. A cacophony of blossoms made by “knock out” graphic technique using ordinary sticker dots create portals to reveal the pristine base beneath the lush, dense surface pattern. These unarticulated dots of non-space produced an effect reminiscent

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Detail of Mixed Berries Aug 25 2021

of the hard-edged ones seen in the Poppies and Dominoes of thirty years ago, in which a crisp white edge contrasts with powdery soot, flocking, and tar. In the first Mimosas, these voids relied on the visually hard, white enamel substrata as counterpoint to the impasto of the paint or tar used to make the leaves. When the occasional end strokes of his fluid underdrawing peeked through, it was like a prize of artistic conceit awarded for close looking. The first Mimosa compositions used the four-square format uniting 4' × 4' panels that long defined Sultan’s large works (itself an outgrowth of the modularity of construction-standard materials, especially the vinyl tiles and Masonite panels). Their grand scale and unnatural shape accentuated with irony their organic subject. They were realized amid the artificiality of the built world with patently industrial components.

His more recent iterations of Mimosas approach with fresh energy certain frontiers previously encountered in his career. One of these is compositional shape: Sultan lately favors a format that stacks a pair of 36" × 96" panels to create a pleasing horizontal 6' × 8' rectangle [see Yellow Mimosa March 4 2022 on page 8]. The new proportion strikes me as reminiscent of the Japanese shoji screens—calling to mind the effect of the Black Lemons suite he mounted as a folding screen for the 1988 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By stretching wider and out to the periphery of vision when seen at gallery distance, these works more assertively envelop the viewer. The sensation is of immersion and embrace, contrasting with the blocky objecthood of the four-panel 8' × 8' compositions.

In a recently completed piece, Yellow Mimosa and Blackberries May 2, 2022, Sultan has detached the blossom pattern from foliage in ways that signal his abstract and non-objective approach to his subject [see page 10]. Rather than reinforce the visual logic of naturalism, which would insist the blooms emerge from the leaves, he situates them on the stark white ground, untethered from the greens or traces of tendrils. Their placement gives the sensation of the yellow blooms flying free of their trees.

Liberated and much larger than in the initial compositions, these orbs pile up and litter the bottom left corner as if dis-assembled while still maintaining their impossibly consistent round shape.

Urgently yellow, they pop off the painting surface towards us.

Their blackberry counterparts—rigid, shiny, uniform circles of blue enamel—seem more fixed, visually rooted to the dense thicket. So intense is the blizzard of yellow blossoms that it takes a moment to recognize what is happening within the array of leaves that foreground them. At bottom left (where the pile of

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blooms visually dominate) the leaves are simply drawn and expressed without color. Up and to the right, there is a band of fronds formed from a thick layer of smoothly-applied cement. These matte gray forms are simply expressed, slender lozenges devoid of shading or articulation. Their crisp edges approach the effect of collage. The upper right half of the painting has finer, black leaves of varied shapes and scale, but similarly unarticulated within their edges and utterly flat.

Halos of graphite powder that define the blossoms have been formed around the overlapping sticker dots during the process. Together with the seam of the two horizontal panels, these traces of process snap us out of the illusion of naturalism and return our attention to the work’s materiality and regular edges.

Ebullient and wild, the blooms connect back to the visual staccato found among the massive banks of mimosa flowers Sultan encountered along the old roads of the Alpes-Maritimes region of the French Riviera. As with other themes pursued in his unique works and multiples over the course of his five-decade career, Sultan is making art that is both inspired by experiences with the organic world and mindful of earlier works of art (both his own and from art history). His Mimosas are not direct, mimetic translations of specimen Acacia dealbata (vulg. silver wattle) plants, just as his Lemons and Poppies are not of the still-life or bogedón traditions, and his Cigarettes and Smoke Rings do not narrate or document particular moments. Rather, the subjects—thoroughly gravid with an energy of perceived motion and, with their alternating soft and hard edges, playing on themes of ephemerality and the organic—are set against their substrate as if within a liminal field, a non-space of consistent color and texture. With fictive space stripped away, we see his appreciation of the tension between the built environment and illusionism. It is worth considering the Mimosas as mural-like. Remembering his pair of Wisteria paintings from long ago (Wisteria September 4, 1988 painted in New York and Glycine July 18, 1988 painted abroad the summer before, and thus titled using wisteria’s French name), I wondered how the Mimosas related to those earlier tile and tar florals. Visually, they recall in particular the plants’ suspension in front of an atmospheric, monochrome field. They stand apart from the many examples of potted plants, fruits and vegetables in dishes, and also his cut bouquets in vases. Instead of being grounded, the Wisteria pictures cascaded from the top edge and were untethered from any pretense of

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Wisteria Sept 4 1988

Detail of Yellow Mimosa and Black Berries May 2 2022

real space, scale, or context. Notably, his inspiration thirty-plus years ago had been the experience of Roman frescoed ceilings, with their inky backgrounds foregrounding the sinuous tendrils and pendulous flowers.

The past two years of Mimosas pursue the outer limits of materials in interesting ways. An impasto of fine grit cement is displacing the earlier preferences for tar and paint for the leaves. One new work, Mimosa Day for Night Jan 19, 2022 consciously inverts the palette multiple times as the composition unfolds [see page 16]. From left working right, we see the fronds and blooms morphing between white, gray, and black in different combinations, punctuated by six “anomaly” blooms of brick red. They proceed logically through the permutations, as follows: black leaves on white with knock out leaves; white leaves on black with silhouetted gray blooms; a mix of white and black leaves on a misty gray background and an explosion of gray bloom clusters; gray leaves on white with predominantly black blooms. Coherent and pleasing overall, this is among the most rigorous working out of the artistic problem Sultan has set himself. It shows his fidelity to the “process ideas” that have long driven his work as well as his enduring desire to achieve elegance by merging intellectual complexity with material simplicity.

Blossoms recently have grown in scale and have proliferated in number, creating strong patterns of color or void. Their color and contours have been explored intentionally. Yellow enamel paint, extremely thinned, pools evenly and translucently with a matte effect that sucks light in contrast to the nearly reflective property of the white enamel ground layer. When I asked about this, Sultan likened the effect of the thinned yellow to fresco. Indeed, the blooms seem tinted more than painted, and their silky three-dimensionality, achieved as it is with industrial materials in pursuit of a suave and nuanced effect, evokes the aesthetics and materiality of early Renaissance murals. (It is important to recall that fresco as a medium is the artistic embellishment of building materials—plaster and cement—achieved by infusing them with a limited palette of primary colors; frescoes are painted into the wall’s materiality, not atop it.)

Graphite powder—used in the earlier work to create softly accented edges to

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the “knock out” voids—sometimes plays the role of modeling the blossoms from beneath the yellow as well. The effect adds volume, suggesting spheres. Sultan’s modulation of these effects commands our attention.

In works like Yellow Mimosa March 4, 2022, the layers of gray cement leaves visually recede and the blooms’ vibrant hues power them to the surface.

A more open and spare approach with a predominantly opaque use of color is seen in Blueberries May 4, 2021. In it, graphite powder and stray underdrawing tone some areas of the background, and crown the edges of a few “knock out” blooms just right of center. The overall effect is most akin to collage, with the dissembled black leaves denying the sensation of a coherent hedge. The berries are a different, terse textural and visual language from their matte yellow and solid orange cousins found in other paintings. The effect they create is more in conversation with that of the matte gray and fuzzy black ones found among the recent paintings. Interestingly, in Yellow Mimosa with Silver Ball May 28 2022 [see page 20], one bloom is made using silver acrylic. From different angles and under gallery lighting, an illusion of non-space is generated as the light reflects off the film.

Mimosa drawings made autumn 2021 reveal the consistency of Sultan’s method and underscore his intention to explore his theme in color and monochrome. Fine arcs give way to a cascade of boughs in White Mimosa Oct 14, 2021 that pirouette across the sheet [see page 24]. Conté edges cut dark tendrils into the background and the crayons’ flat faces are used to form the wispier leaves.

Decal dots of a modest diameter preserve the white paper and are naturally Blue Berries May 4 2021

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silhouetted by the crayon dust that softens and warms the unprotected areas.

This drawing—like those presented in 2019—is highly finished and entirely fluid in its economy of color and variety of elegant mark making. White and Green Mimosa Leaves with Yellow Dec 14, 2021—a much more aggressive and dense composition built up from strokes so rough, the surface seems almost gravelly—may at first might seem a polar opposite expression of the previous drawing [see page 22]. Touches of blue suggest a sky peeking through thick layers of leaves. The “knock out” blooms—the same size as in the other—have been left dirtied by the loose media. Ten blooms—maybe five percent of all the blooms—are done in yellow crayon, balancing out the sheet and creating a three dimensionality that is quite pleasing to the eye. But structurally, these two drawings emerge from a remarkably consistent method. Both have been worked out from multiple angles, with maybe six strong vertical zones and a density which pools into one corner. In some ways, their relationship parallels what we see in the paintings—some coming out of a dark ground and particularly celebrating the blossoms while others are intentionally open and light, using the blooms as a way to bore backward into the composition. The Mimosa drawings stand distinct, however, from the new monochrome explosions of clustered Poppies, each so thoughtfully magnified and cropped, which extend Sultan’s longstanding pairing of super-velvety fields color on stark white paper into this new and exciting moment in his career. In the new Mimosa works—these meticulously crafted paintings and drawings—we see a most elegant mediation of the boundaries between naturalism and the industrial reality of our modern world.

Green Poppies April 11 2022

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Donald Sultan in his Tribeca studio, 2022

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Exhibition Checklist

p. 8

Yellow Mimosa March 4 2022, 2022 72 × 96 inches (182.9 × 243.8 cm) Enamel, cement, tar, and graphite on masonite p. 10

Yellow Mimosa and Black Berries May 2 2022, 2022 72 × 96 inches (182.9 × 243.8 cm) Enamel, tar, cement, and graphite on masonite p. 12

Mixed Berries Aug 25 2021, 2021 72 × 96 inches (182.9 × 243.8 cm) Enamel, vinyl, tar, ink, and graphite on masonite p. 14

p. 20

Yellow Mimosa with Silver Ball May 28 2022, 2022 48 × 48 inches (121.9 × 121.9 cm) Enamel, cement, acrylic, and graphite on masonite p. 22

White and Green Mimosa Leaves with Yellow Dec 14 2021, 2021 48 × 60 1/2 inches (121.9 × 153.7 cm) Conte crayon, charcoal, and graphite on paper p. 24

White Mimosa Oct 14 2021, 2021 48 × 60 1/2 inches (121.9 × 153.7 cm) Conte crayon, charcoal, and graphite on paper

Yellow Mimosa with Two Anomalies May 28 2022, 2022 72 × 96 inches (182.9 × 243.8 cm) Enamel, cement, acrylic, and graphite on masonite

p. 26

p. 16

p. 28

Mimosa Day For Night Jan 19 2022, 2022 48 × 96 inches (121.9 × 243.8 cm) Enamel, vinyl, tar, cement, and graphite on masonite p. 18

Steel Mimosa with Anomaly June 16 2022, 2022 48 × 48 inches (121.9 × 121.9 cm) Acrylic, tar, enamel and graphite on masonite

Steel Mimosa June 10 2022, 2022 48 × 60 1/2 inches (121.9 × 153.7 cm) Charcoal, acrylic, flocking, and graphite on paper

Mimosa June 2 2022, 2022 48 × 60 1/2 inches (121.9 × 153.7 cm) Charcoal, conte crayon, and graphite on paper Not included in the catalogue

Mimosas with Silver June 28 2022,

2022 48 × 96 inches (121.9 × 243.8 cm) Enamel, acrylic, and graphite on masonite

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition Donald Sultan THE NATURE OF THINGS September 8 through October 22, 2022 Ryan Lee Gallery 515 West 26th Street New York, NY 10011 212 397 0742 www.ryanleegallery.com Catalogue managers Ethel Renia and Daisy Fornengo Photography Adam Reich Essay Tom Loughman Design Omnivore Publication copyright © 2022 Ryan Lee Gallery All rights reserved.

ISBN: 979-8-9864991-1-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022914699

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