Word: sultans
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...best summer ever. Israel was throwing a lavish 40th- birthday party, and the Ministry of Tourism expected the crowds to break all records. Foreign visitors would flock to the festivals or the spectacular $12 million staging of Verdi's Nabucco in the 5,000-seat Sultan's Pool. They would sample the rich history of Jerusalem, the flashing, clear waters of Eilat, the archaeological drama of Masada. Bracing for a flood of guests, Hyatt International unveiled a $60 million, 500-room hotel in Jerusalem. Airlines scheduled extra flights, and car-rental agencies planned to plump up their fleets. Israeli tourist...
This laborious process favors contour and flatness, light-and-dark contrast rather than color, and the single iconic shape. Sultan does decoratively what an older American artist like Robert Moskowitz does grandly: by taking a familiar shape and rescaling it, mainly as profile -- one still life of an egg and three lemons on a plate is also 8 ft. square -- he slows up recognition and provokes, in the more successful paintings, a sense of strangeness...
...refineries belching out their pollutants under a Stygian sky, the emotive content of the image (industry as Pandemonium) is at odds with the stolid execution. Few techniques could be less suited to depicting what is fugitive and mobile, like fire and smoke, than cutting silhouettes from roofing tar. Sultan leans toward the mummified sublime. His stage effects of glare and silhouette descend, remotely, from Turner. But he is so used to thinking in terms of figure and ground that he handles the transitions between them -- the midtones, the modulations of light -- clumsily at best...
...area of Sultan's work that seems unequivocally successful is his drawings -- big, densely worked silhouettes of tulips and lemons, with so much charcoal ground into the paper over repeated layers of fixative that its blackness is velvety and palpable, with something of the richness of Jasper Johns' encaustic or Richard Serra's paintstick drawings. Sultan is highly sensitive to the play of black and white. In drawings like Black Tulip May 23, 1983, he gives his shapes an admirable, embodied decisiveness: you sense that they have all been the subject of hard aesthetic argument. The tulip stems swoon like...
...Sultan's instinct for pattern could have degenerated into a formula by now, especially given the market demand for his drawings, but it shows no sign of doing so -- though the small still-life paintings are perhaps another matter. Within his limitations, he is certainly an artist to watch...