Santa Monica

New York artist Donald Sultan is so well established as a painter that a major exhibition of his work toured American museums in 1987. Now, however, we find him making a debut--as a sculptor. Time will tell whether this show of 10 metal and wood pieces is a detour, a new direction or just a respite from Sultan’s central endeavor. In the meantime, this is a not an effort to be discounted; in every sense of the word, the show is a weighty matter.

Titles of several pieces--”1300 Lbs. Lead and Paint,” “3500 Lbs. Ball and Chain,” “444 Lbs. Iron and Iron (Displaced)” and “444 Lbs. Iron and Wood (Displaced)”--leave no doubt that Sultan is interested in actual weight, while the works themselves embody a palpable heaviness. The ball and chain, suspended from a reinforced ceiling, appears dangerously weighty. The two 444-pound works--one with an iron cube balanced on a cast iron crucible, the other consisting of a crucible set on a solid wood cube--compare the masses of two materials that weigh in at the same figure. A lead teacup over-filled with tar and four lead buckets loaded with red polyurethane paint, on the other hand, seem to examine the notion of containment and the phenomenon of liquids that turn into heavy solids.

What does this have to do with Sultan’s painting? On the face of it, not much except a continuing fascination with industrial forms and materials. Influenced by Minimalism, Pop and Process Art, Sultan has worked with tar, linoleum, plywood and plaster to create weighty “paintings” that are actually constructed objects. Along with emblematic lemons, his imagery has included smokestacks, battleships and oil derricks. But this work-a-day aspect has always been glamorized by an elegant touch and mollified by a pervasively romantic sensibility. In his sculpture, Sultan strips away the murkiness that has marred his most overblown paintings and gets back to the clarity that characterizes his best work. If the elegance has gone, in a cosmetic sense, it is present in conceptual refinement. (BlumHelman Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., to Saturday.)