Sultan's Endgames: To see how different are the paths contemporary painting may take, turn from Schulz's show to the selection of New Yorker Donald Sultan's work at Sorokko.
Sultan has for many years built his paintings - if that is the word for them - on wood armatures that have the presence of rough furniture.
The armatures support surfaces on which he can layer compounds of spackle, tar, enamel and sometimes flock to produce a picture such as "Black and Colors Sept 2 2006" (2006).
Traces of the hand get suppressed in Sultan's working process, yet viewers will not mistake his work for anyone else's. His blatantly simplified forms usually pertain to, even if they do not easily read as, images.
He has painted buttons, playing cards, dominoes, curlicues of cigar smoke, fruits and vegetables.
One signature symbol in particular, recurrent in the current selection, has an unplotted timeliness: the artificial red "remembrance poppies" used in Europe - especially Britain - and Canada to symbolize mourning for soldiers killed in World War I.
Sultan began using the artificial poppy profiles, varying their colors, many years ago. But the centennial of World War I's inception this month has given them a discomfiting new currency.
Sultan's art looks simple at first, but a long view of it, which this exhibition unfortunately cannot offer, shows a serious thinker about representation whose work has never ceased to acknowledge the fear, current at the outset of his career, that painting as an art had - and might yet - finally hit an unbreachable wall.
Donald Sultan: Paintings and drawings. Through July 31. Serge Sorokko Gallery, 55 Geary St., S.F. (415) 421-7770. www.sorokko.com.
