Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: It’s time to talk about Donald Sultan, born in 1951, the artist who managed to transform tar into gold. Not the gold of speculators or art dealers swarming Chelsea, but the black gold of American industry, the lifeblood of our post-industrial society, flowing like blood in our arteries.
Let’s first focus on his “Disaster Paintings”, monumental works measuring 2.4 meters by 2.4 meters, confronting us with our own hubris. Sultan doesn’t deal in subtlety—he takes industrial disasters, factory fires, train derailments, and transforms them into visual meditations on our declining civilization. These paintings are our modern Guernica, except instead of screaming horses and grieving women, we get factory silhouettes against sulfuric skies, haunting specters of our own technological arrogance.
In Early Morning May 20 1986, one of his most powerful works, the toxic yellow sky seems ready to explode, while industrial structures rise like monuments to our collective folly. It’s as if Max Ernst painted the industrial apocalypse—but Sultan uses the very materials of this apocalypse to create his art. Philosopher Paul Virilio spoke of accidents revealing essence—Sultan’s Disaster Paintings are precisely that: revelations of the very substance of modernity.
What’s fascinating is how Sultan manipulates his materials. He doesn’t rely on €50 paint tubes from chic Parisian boutiques. No, he uses tar, putty, linoleum tiles—the very materials that form the backbone of our cities. Walter Benjamin discussed art in the age of mechanical reproduction; Sultan creates art with the materials of that very reproduction. It’s as if Heidegger became a painter instead of philosophizing about the essence of technology.
Take Plant May 29, 1985. Factory chimneys emerge from a tar fog like industrial totems. Sultan doesn’t merely depict a disaster—he creates a new form of industrial sublime. Edmund Burke described the sublime as that which overwhelms and terrifies us while irresistibly attracting us. Sultan’s works perfectly embody this definition, confronting us with the terror of our own creation—industry—while seducing us with their brutal beauty.
Now let’s examine his second obsession: monumental still lifes. His black lemons, oversized flowers, and giant apples aren’t mere stylistic exercises or respectful nods to Chardin or Cézanne. No, they’re visual punches forcing us to reconsider our relationship with the natural world. When Sultan paints a black lemon the size of a small satellite, he doesn’t just play with scale—he creates a visual black hole that absorbs all our certainties about what a still life should be.
In his 1985 Black Lemons series, the fruits become unsettling presences, closer to Louise Bourgeois’s sculptures than traditional still lifes. The deep black of tar gives these lemons an overwhelming physicality. It’s as if Malevich decided to paint fruits—except Sultan imbues his geometric forms with an organic sensuality that makes them deeply disquieting.
These still lifes are as far from traditional compositions as David Lynch films are from Netflix rom-coms. Sultan twists classical genre codes until they cry mercy. His flowers don’t comfort us with their ephemeral beauty—they confront us with our mortality as bluntly as a tanker truck.
Philosopher Susan Sontag wrote that art should teach us to see, hear, and feel more. Sultan’s works do exactly that, though not in expected ways. He forces us to see beauty in disaster, poetry in industry, and transcendence in the mundane. It’s as if Theodor Adorno met Robert Rauschenberg in an abandoned Detroit warehouse.
Take Forest Fire, 1984. The work captures not only the destructive violence of a forest fire but also the terrible beauty of that destruction. Flames rendered in black tar and glossy latex dance on the surface like shadows on a Platonic cave wall. Sultan makes us confront our fascination with destruction while reminding us of our responsibility for ecological catastrophes.
His technique is as brutal as it is innovative. He starts by fixing linoleum tiles onto Masonite panels, creating a rigid grid that underpins his compositions. This grid isn’t just a support—it’s a metaphor for our desire for order amidst chaos. As Michel Foucault noted, the grid is a fundamental structure of modern thought. Sultan uses it as a starting point, then subverts it with streams of tar and splashes of latex.
The process is physical, almost violent. He pours boiling tar, sculpts it, scrapes it, sometimes revealing the linoleum beneath. It’s a hand-to-hand combat with the material, reminiscent of Pollock’s action painting—except Sultan works with substances that could kill a man. The danger is real—just as it was in the factories and mines that inspired his work.
In Air Strike April 22, 1987, one of his most striking pieces, the violence of the process echoes the violence of the subject. Tar traces and latex splashes create an apocalyptic atmosphere where the distinction between sky and ground, natural and artificial, vanishes. This is painting that smells of sulfur and sweat, reminding us that beneath the façade of civilization lies the ever-present potential for chaos.
Sultan doesn’t just represent the world—he rebuilds it with his own hands, using the materials of our industrial civilization. As philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote about matter, it is not passive but active, resistant, and laden with meaning. Sultan understands this instinctively. His works aren’t images of disasters or still lifes—they are disasters and still lifes materialized.
Take his black tulips, for example. These monumental charcoal-on-paper flowers aren’t mere botanical studies. They are physical presences occupying space with the authority of a Richard Serra sculpture. The dense black of the charcoal creates zones of darkness so deep they seem to absorb light like black holes. It’s as if Sultan gave material form to melancholy itself.
And his Smoke Rings—floating toxic halos on black backgrounds—aren’t simply beautiful; they are ominous, like harbingers of environmental destruction. Smoke rendered with near-photographic precision becomes a symbol of our technological excess, our capacity to pollute even the skies above.
Sultan’s work balances precariously between order and chaos, control and accident. His pieces are constructed with an architect’s precision but contain the freedom of an abstract expressionist. This tension gives his work its visceral power. As Georges Bataille wrote, true art always exists at the edge of possibility, at the boundary between form and formlessness.
Critics who see Sultan’s work as mere elegant formal exercises miss the point entirely. His oeuvre is deeply rooted in the contradictions of our time: our yearning for order amidst surrounding chaos, our nostalgia for nature despite our dependence on technology, our need for beauty amid the ugliness of industrial disasters.
In 1999, Sultan was invited to create a permanent installation for Budapest’s Art’otel. Instead of hanging a few paintings on the walls, he transformed the entire hotel into a total work of art, designing everything from fountains to carpets to bathrobes. It was as if Richard Wagner became an interior designer—but Sultan created his Gesamtkunstwerk with industrial materials instead of musical notes.
This ability to transcend traditional boundaries between fine and applied arts, between painting and architecture, defines Sultan’s approach. He doesn’t respect established borders—he uses them as starting points for exploration. As Marcel Duchamp said, art isn’t about form but function. Sultan understands this instinctively.
Look at Battery May 5, 1986. The layers of tar and latex create a complex topography, turning the painting’s surface into a landscape to explore. Tool marks, traces of gestures, process accidents—all become integral to the work. It’s as if Jackson Pollock decided to paint industrial landscapes.
Sultan doesn’t aim to comfort with pleasing images. His art is as tough and unyielding as the materials he uses. But it is this very toughness that makes his work so relevant today. In a world where contemporary art often gets lost in empty conceptual posturing, Sultan reminds us that painting can still be a powerful medium to understand our times.
Take the time to stand before one of his Disaster Paintings. Watch how the black tar absorbs light like a black hole. See how factory silhouettes emerge from chaos like industrial ghosts. This is painting that grips you viscerally before your brain even begins to analyze what you’re seeing. It’s art that speaks directly to your nervous system, like a Mahler symphony or a Tarkovsky film.
In his use of black, Sultan joins a long lineage of artists who understood the power of this non-color. From Goya to Pierre Soulages to Ad Reinhardt, black has always been more than a mere absence of light—it is an active presence, a force structuring space. Sultan’s blacks are particularly potent because they are made of tar, a material embodying the history of our industrial revolution.
His monumental still lifes also play with this tension between presence and absence. A black lemon by Sultan isn’t simply a lemon painted black—it’s an object existing in a liminal space between representation and abstraction, nature and culture. As Roland Barthes wrote of photography, these images are both there and not there, present and absent.
The way Sultan treats space in his works is also remarkable. In his large formats, space isn’t merely a container for depicted objects—it becomes an active participant. The voids between forms are as significant as the forms themselves. It’s as if Sultan intuitively grasped what philosopher Martin Heidegger meant by space as a “clearing of being”.
Visit a Sultan exhibition. See how he reinvents the medium using industrial materials. Observe how he transforms linoleum tiles and tar into visual poetry. This is true innovation in art—not the latest trendy styles, but the ability to make an ancient medium say something new.
In his Tribeca studio, Sultan continues to work with the same intensity as at the start of his career. He hasn’t succumbed to the art market’s sirens, hasn’t diluted his work to please collectors. He remains true to his vision, exploring the possibilities of his industrial materials with the curiosity of a medieval alchemist.
Sultan’s work is a testament to the resilience of painting as a medium. In a world saturated with digital images and virtual reality, he reminds us that nothing can replace the physical experience of art. His paintings aren’t windows into another world—they are objects existing in our world, as real and tangible as the walls surrounding us.
So next time you hear someone say painting is dead, take them to see a Donald Sultan work. And remind them that as long as there are artists capable of transforming industrial materials into visual poetry, painting will remain very much alive. That’s Sultan’s true legacy—showing us that art can still surprise, destabilize, and move us, even with the most mundane materials of our industrial world.