SANTA MONICA

Donald Sultan constructs heroic-scale paintings that are, in effect, elegies to a dead Modernism. His subjects--which vacillate between large Manet-like still lifes of voluptuous fruit or flowers and disaster scenarios--are superficial and banal, gratuitous images that merely decorate the industrial processes and materials that compose and define them.

One explores a Sultan painting archeologically rather than representationally. Instead of examining surface detail, such as the sensuous orange washes that define a bowl of oranges, or the white chalk marks that delineate a vase of gladiola, we look at the work’s underlying strata, the physical layers that both constitute its structure and bury its historical origins.

Thus we discover that each black background is actually composed of four masonite panels that are in turn covered by tar-coated linoleum tiles. These compose a broader, 64 section grid, an obvious metaphor for the formal structure of Modernism itself. Sections of tile have been cut away and filled in with white spackling, which provides the basis and background for the oil painted image. The panels are mounted away from the wall on plywood and metal struts, creating both a sandwich effect and a clear physical and conceptual distancing from the traditional presentational plane.

Such layering is a form of covering up, interment if you will, of the high Modernist precepts that Sultan’s paintings attempt to honor and ultimately supersede. Repainting Manet in the 1980s is both presumptuous and irrelevant, but not if you repaint him on the grave of his ethos. Sultan’s work is thus a recognition that traditional painting can only be validated as a memorial, not only to an outmoded aesthetic, but also, in this era of high tech informational systems, the materialist industrial past. In short, Sultan is a painter of sentimental obituaries. (BlumHelman, 916 Colorado Ave., to April 11.)