It’s Big The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art goes for the bold with Donald Sultan’s exhibit. By David Hall Apparently, a lot of folks are all aflutter over the new Donald Sultan exhibit, not because any of them are that familiar with the artist’s work, but because it is happening in Memphis — at the Brooks of all places. I mean no disrespect, but by now I’ve resigned myself to the fact that the city museum is the place to catch a duck decoy collection or dem’ “Jewels of the Romanovs.” Sure, they have a fabulous collection of really old paintings, fragile-looking furniture, and frippery. And while I have surveyed some nice pieces in the contemporary collection, overall the motley assortment screams Mayberry. In its history, the Brooks’ relationship with contemporary art has been checkered at best. But the Sultan exhibit following so close on the heels of last springs’ “Duane Hanson Retrospective” may signal a new chapter for the museum. Memphis is just the first stop for “Donald Sultan: In the Still Life Tradition”; coordinated by the Brooks, the exhibit will tour four museums around the country in the coming year, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Donald Sultan is usually associated with the New Image movement, which in the aftermath of mind-numbing minimalism and conceptualism, sought to use figuration in a bold and an unfettered manner. When one looks at the paintings, there is a sense that the artist freely appropriated whatever influences and materials were at his disposal. One can find traces of recent and not-so-recent art history in the imagery, and it is obvious that Sultan’s laborious process contributes to the rugged presence of these works. The physicality of Sultan’s work comes from its enormity combined with the unique use of industrial materials. An explanation of the artist’s process near the entrance to the exhibit states that “linoleum floor tiles attached to slabs of Masonite form the basis of the support structure. On top of the foot square vinyl tiles, Sultan applies a layer of butyl rubber, a tar-like substance used in roofing. After sketching out the image in chalk, the artist cuts into the thick, black surface and then rebuilds it with plaster, before applying color with a sponge or rag.” Each painting is comprised of four distinct panels, 4-foot square, joined into one monumental image. The panels and the floor tiles form a grid, which simultaneously brings to mind the classical use of grids by artists to increase the scale of a drawing, ’70s Minimalism, Gilbert and George, and not the least, floor tiles. The butyl rubber is sliced, gouged, and blowtorched into submission with shreds of the sooty-black substance left clinging like cobwebs to the surface. Porous plaster that fills the hollows left by the cutaway rubber takes on the oil pigment as a stain, absorbing it. Despite the title of the exhibit, there is nothing traditional about Sultan’s approach to still life. In general, each painting is of the silhouette of a single object or multiples of objects, centered icon-like. There is a predilection for using rounded or voluptuous forms of lemons, oranges, eggs, morning glory centers, buttons, etc., against the right-angle grid of the tiles. In Four Lemons, February 1, 1985, perhaps Sultan’s best-known work, an electric surface is created on the background by scrapping up swaths of the butyl rubber in uniform rows, its vibrations tamed by the mass of the lemons in the foreground. Some say that the Four Lemons painting and others simmer with eroticism because the lemons and their protruding navels suggest breasts. But given the hulking scale of the work, as well as the materials — I mean it’s roofing tar for Christ’s sake — how anyone could feel the least bit randy in their presence is beyond me. I noticed two distinct kinds of images at play here. On one hand, there are the flowers and fruit that operate on a visceral level, as in Black Roses in a Black Rose Vase, February 2, 1990 and Spike Acanthe, July 5, 1993. The latter smolders as swipes of greens and reds tumultuously intermingle then turn to mud, and the silhouette of the plant emerges out of the stew with a kind of Turner-esque drama. On the other hand, there are the buttons and dominoes, which impassively state their face value like a stop sign. Black Button, April 3, 1997 is an 8-foot facsimile of the real thing. Standing above the dull and pitted ground, the front of the button shines with the blackened finish of shoe leather. Likewise, the slick Four Buttons, July 29, 1995 offers the same pop deadpan. There is something a little unsettling about standing before these works; they loom above you coldly. The innovation with materials that brought these works into fruition is an old alchemy by now, Sultan having long since turned butyl rubber into gold. The whole process seems to have become formulaic, calculated. It would have been nice to see some of the artist’s sculptural and print works as a counterpoint to these colossal efforts. As it were, the collection of drawings and tempera paintings on paper in an adjoining gallery are so minute and repetitive, after the onslaught of the large works, that trying to give these introspective works their due is just too tenuous. You can e-mail David Hall at letters@memphisflyer.com.