Jim Lutes’ painted imagery—empty beer cans, cigarette butts, Fritos bags, and TV sets—initially seems hardly worth celebrating. What keeps us from turning away from a world we know all too well is the sense of humor and subtle formal intelligence his paintings reveal. Even in a painting as thickly populated with everyday debris as The Spot, 1989, the specificity of the images gives way to the power of paint and to a range of suggestive implications. In Sobriety, 1990, the autonomy of the paint is taken a step further; a large blob of painted marks enters a room, empty except for a single chair,