Red Poppies: April 14, 2003

Sultan is recognized for his unusual painting techniques and his invigoration of the still-life genre, which he pushes in the direction of abstraction and Pop Art. Instead of canvas, Sultan works on masonite covered with vinyl floor tiles, which are assembled grid-like fashion. The vinyl-tile surfaces are then covered with tar on which Sultan draws, in this case, a poppy image. The floral forms are excavated and then covered and filled with drywall spackle, which when cured, are painted with vividly hued enamels. Sultan then intrudes a black rayon flocking, the texture of which suggests poppy pollen. He finally gouges and scrapes the area surrounding his subject, producing rhythmically obsessive vertical striations on the surface, and creating an abstract ground in the process. Sultan's paintings resonate across several artistic contexts including Richard Serra's angular, deeply black oil-stick drawings; Donald Judd's interest in the repetition of industrial materials; and Andy Warhol's focus on isolated images. His work also engages 1970s and 1980s painting, in which artists pushed the limits of what constituted the painted picture plane. Like Julian Schnabel or Anselm Kiefer, Sultan also found the need to reinforce the richness and depth of the painting's surface after the spartan attitudes of Minimalism and Conceptualism.