Altoon Sultan at Tibor de Nagy - Brief Article

Art in America, Oct, 2001 by Peter Gallo

This was Altoon Sultan's first show at Tibor de Nagy, whose stable she has recently joined. The painter enjoyed early success in the 1970s, when she became known for her serene depictions of vernacular dwellings in placid northeast towns. Drawing stylistically from 19th-century topographical paintings and the Luminism of Martin Johnson Heade, often applying her superb facility to the traditional medium of egg tempera, Sultan was part of a loosely affiliated group of new landscape painters that included Catherine Murphy, Marjorie Portnow and Rackstraw Downes.

The 21 works shown here range in scale and medium from her signature cabinet-size egg temperas on panel to larger, flatly painted oils on canvas, which are the most recent. With these paintings, Sultan has wandered into the American agricultural milieu. This expanded outlook opens a broader set of implications. Viewed through the frame of 19th-century Pictorialism, the techno-industrial transformation of the local farm takes on a monstrous aspect. Industrial manure spreaders, irrigation tractors, plastic hutches for calves, concrete manure bunkers, metal Quonset barns, the occassional silo or 19th-century outbuilding, set in hazy summer fields of pigweed and mullein lined with fencerows of alder, are painted with deadpan Sheeleresque precision.

Sultan's art-historical allusions are sophisticated and subtle: in Ag-bagger, Danville, Vermont (2000), at 80 by 60 inches the largest work in the show, a contraption of green and blue sheet metal and translucent plastic set in a citron-green field looks like a giant butterfly chrysalis, or possibly a "desiring machine" dreamed up by Matthew Barney. Silage Covered by Plastic and Tires, Newbury, Vermont (1999) presents a pile of old tires and black polyurethane plastic draped over a mountain of hay against a backdrop of irrigation tractors, Atrozine-bleached cornfields and unbearably bucolic summer hills. In a most unsettling way the image calls up both Smithson's earth-works and the figure of the agonized Magdalene in Grunewald's Crucifixion.

Clearly, Sultan does not go nearly as far as Sue Coe or Damien Hirst to give us the carcasses of the others that have literally fleshed out the structure of what Derrida has called the "system of carnivorous virility." But the simple and stunning heterological compositions of these pictures, their often austere and uncanny beauty, and a realism that does not pastorally distance us from the means of agricultural production, profoundly disrupt any consoling illusion of peace and plenty.