If he imagines himself as a Flemish master I wouldn’t be surprised, for in him the legacy of luminous color and fastidious execution has found an heir. Indeed, Robert Lostutter is an artist whose mystic-emotional insights, unique imagery and deliberate compositions make him no mere disciple but rather an adept in his own right.
Although he entered the public arena along with the Imagists over ten years ago, he has not shared their recognition. Devotees, however, have established him as a Chicago cult figure, and during his last exhibition, four seasons ago, I too was converted.
Lostutter’s watercolor portraits of fish- and birdmen were devastating, but his new pieces, primarily of leafed, flowered and feathered faces, surpass even their beauty and bizarreness. Clues to the recent potency may be found in Lostutter’s poem, “The Departure,” written in 1979: the narrator-artist becomes a bird, takes flight from his wintry environment, soars to paradise and then returns to make an image of his experience of perfection. In a 1978 self-portrait accompanied by another poem, Lostutter suggests that he had to choose one of two opposing directions: “Bird of prey descending fast to cut this earth and spill the sea/Bird of paradise hidden in me.”
Lostutter’s transformation warms his recent oils and watercolors. Their increased density, brilliance and nuance partake of the same tropical torridness apparent in “The Departure.” Background tones melt into one another; apricot turns to russet then magenta, suggesting an otherworldly sunset; teal blue lightens and darkens, suggesting waves absorbing sunlight. Heads are covered with hair so scrupulously styled as to suggest ritualistic coiffures; voluptuous lips, once snarling, are parted in awe, and eyes, narrow and unlashed, seem to watch in wonder, as if penetrating some spiritual mystery. Skin, still supernaturally smooth, is pinker and glossier.
In both the oil and watercolor titled The Departure, a stream of pearly light bathes the figure as though he were a Baroque saint. Orchids roped across his forehead and along his cheeks suggest a process of mystical grafting and thus transmutation. The sense of martyrdom and excruciating pain that used to characterize much of Lostutter’s work, especially his bound and feather-pierced figures, has given way to a renunciation of savagery. If the new figures are victims, regeneration and flowering are their destiny. In In the Paradise It Is Night, plumes read less as arrows stabbing a man’s face and hands than they do as slender petals sprouting from them, with feather shafts replacing veins.
Perhaps more than anything, Lostutter’s “departure” is, symbolically, about what he has become by seeing both into and beyond himself. He has created a spiritual self-portraiture in which human beings, through their merger with nature, experience rapture.
—Joanna Frueh
