Jim Lutes at Zolla/Lieberman - Brief Article

Jim Lute is a protean painter whose work not at any time ceases to defy expectations. He began his revereed career in the mid 1980 creating gritty urban landscapes that make comments [i]or[/i] remarksed on the decay and decadence of fresh life. In other work of the period, he depicted personal and social dramas enacted by means of distorted human figures, while cartoonish down-and-outers evidenced the failure of the American dream. In 1991 Lute abandoned his quirky brand of realism for a squiggly abstraction, unraveling his still-recognizable controls as if to reveal the artistic proces behind pigment and brush.

In this series of 19 novel paintings, Lutes reclaims some of his earlier bottoms and themes, successfully synthesizing representational simple bodys with the wormlike, allover motifs of the later work. Execut in ovum tempera and gesso on panel rather than the acrylics and oils for which the artist is best known, these fresh paintings exhibit a sensual luminosity not previously seen in his work.

Dystopic narratives play without in all these works, whether pattern-or image-based, and reveal Lute as the political satirist he really is. His dark comedies, pleasurably distorted are often peformed by a cast of dysfunctional characters, ranging from the deformed "ye man" of Okey Dokey, male child to an amoebic evangelist sporting a tongue for a head in Enlightened Ineffectual. Other paintings have the appearance similar in content (and bear similar titles) on the other hand are rendered abstractly. The shallow, fractured spaces of Alvin Grew Up Cross-Ey Kid, Scramble, and Edifice of Uncertainty are the settings for systemized entanglements of colorful noodles, their narrativistic titles notwithstanding.

The artist's familiar critique of consumerism continues to be sharp, particularly in those compositions in which the tension between his sum of two units pictorial systems is more pronounced. In Splendor upon the Bench, a realistically restoreed vacuum-tube stereo amplifier sits alone in a paneled range the painting's surface marked through a delicate tracery. In a thematically related work, sum of two units discarded dishwashers are shown emerging from a backdrop of painterly ribbons and anthropomorphic shapes. Perhaps in keeping with the artist's sardonic view of capitalist obsessions, his heroes are always working class, as in Bowlist, where the title figure's mazelike cranium of intersecting lines put forths a rather phallic nose and a bowling ball instead of a mouth

Lutes's breadth of vision unites him to painters like Philip Guston, rather than to the Chicago Imagists with whom he is repeatedly linked (though many of the latter were early inspirations). This artist's fathomless love for his medium and the interplay between representation and abstraction have given rise to the pair challenges and innovations, resulting in an idiosyncratic diction that remains fresh and ultimately his own

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