Donald Sultan

This catalogue of a traveling-exhibition opening this fall at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art highlights the work of an artist who constructs his own canvases from butyl roofing material and vinyl tiles. Sultan is steeped in Manet, the Old Masters and billboard art; his clever work is essentially painting about painting, and as such, insular and aloof. He portrays industrial smokestacks as if they were the stems of flowers. Using newspaper photographs of a plane crash or a guerrilla bombing, he creates semiabstract paintings of public events, ambiguous in meaning. In pictures like Steers, Cypress Trees and Cantaloupe Pickers, he goes after the essence of his subjects through reductionist patterning. Colorful lemons and tulips are full of erotic associations. Yet, in Black Lemons and Black Tulipstark, charcoal-on-paper drawingshis art takes a conceptual turn. (September)