Donald Sultan came of age artistically in Chicago in the mid ’70s. He returns here with his first one-person museum exhibition, a traveling show of paintings and charcoal drawings from the last seven years, organized by Lynne Warren, associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Sultan, who is known for his repertory of generic, highly associative images, is a talented artist; but his work cannot support the inflated rhetoric of Warren’s catalogue essay, which inadvertently matches the artist’s frequently overblown graphic and structural flourishes.

Sultan’s elaborate methods of constructing

When I first saw Robert Lostutter’s paintings three years ago, I found it difficult to imagine the man who had made them. Contradictions abounded in them with such absoluteness, such refusal to permit any resolution or compromise, that I felt I needed to meet him to assure myself that only one person had done them. (Usually it works the other way around for me: the art makes a singular impression that knowing the artist tends to fracture.) Although I have now had several conversations with Lostutter about painting, and find him a very sensible, straightforward person, this hasn’t helped me to