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Donald Sultan Black Button, 1997 enamel, wax, spackle, tar, and tile on masonite 96 x 96 in. I had no interest in narrative painting, illusionistic painting or being totally flat. I had no interest in being totally abstract, I had no interest in being figurative. I wanted to combine these things somehow to create a viable situation that both had power and meaning and was riddled with kinds of paradoxes that feed on each other so they can have a life.1 Donald Sultan First there is the medium: macho materials from the building supply store. A grid of sixty-four linoleum tiles has been bonded to four panels of masonite, then covered with tar and spackle, carved back, filled in, and finally covered with paint. The final object is a couple of inches thick, and mounted on a wood stretcher that holds it still further out from the wall. There is a great deal of craftsmanship to Sultan’s work, the kind that builds a deck or reroofs a garage, but also the kind that the fifteenth-century Florentine Cennino Cennini wrote about in his handbook for artists. Tar is Sultan’s gold leaf, and like the painter of a medieval altarpiece he is more concerned with surfaces than with space. Then there is the subject matter. That can be macho also: Sultan has painted blast furnaces and other industrial landscapes, fires and disasters -- but in the recent painting there are traditional still-life elements -- oranges, lemons, flowers and ornate vases: dainty subject matter of the kind that in the nineteenth century was associated with female artists. Buttons, of course, are associated with the feminine craft of sewing. But the scale of these paintings is hardly dainty. What happens when a button is bigger than a Greek warrior’s shield, bigger than a tractor tire? Viewers confronted with this particular painting in the original (rather than in the reduced scale of a catalogue reproduction) have sometimes failed to recognize the subject at all. Finally there is the composition. Often in Sultan’s work traces of the modular tile grid are visible. Here they are hidden, but the divisions between the four panels echo the underlying grid. Each of the four panels carries an identical, asymmetric pattern of arcs and circles. Assembled (like squares of a patchwork quilt) they create a symmetrical pattern. A square of four squares assembles to produce a circle that centers on a square of circles. This is the sort of compositional exersize that the color-field painters and minimal artists of the 1960s and 70s set themselves in strictly nonrepresentational terms. Indeed, the restricted palette and the carefully worked finish of this painting recall minimalists like Don Judd or Brice Marden. Yet the subject matter implies a challenge to these earlier modes. It is as if Sultan were saying: “Circles balanced against circles -- four white disks create a black cross -- figure-ground reversals -- Yes, of course I can do that too. But notice that it’s also just a big button (and in case you didn’t notice, I’ve written the title “Black Button” along the left edge).” Logically, representing an everyday object on a giant scale should link Sultan to the Pop artists, and yet it does not, at least not nearly as obviously as one might expect. Claes Oldenburg’s giant hamburgers and clothespins are essentially sculptural, even architectural, and although they are not without serious overtones, there is ultimately something comic about their overblown scale. Sultan’s button, tightly bound to the plane, is insistently a painting in spite of its actual three-dimensionality, and its giant size, coupled with a suit of solemn black, does not encourage a smile. The seriousness of Sultan’s painting is a corollary of its ambition. An artist who wants narrative and abstraction, flatness and illusion, and power and meaning riddled with paradox, is an artist who wants to have it all. It is significant that a group of recent paintings of lemons were inspired by a Manet still life. Manet was another artist who wanted to have it all: to be rebel and academician, to have the light and atmosphere of Impressionism and the physicality of Dutch seventeenth-century art, to paint a bunch of asparagus as grand as a Venus by Titian. No one gets it all, but if you are up to trying for it, you may wind up with a lot. Timothy Riggs
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