Deth P. Sun’s Bitter News of the Innert Life
Jamey Hecht
Deth P. Sun paints small pictures of hapless
creatures in stark, elemental environments like clouds or still water or the
sea. They’re simple, uncluttered and exquisitely heartbreaking oil paintings
on masonite, that bring the visual sweetness of cartooning far out from that
genre, to deploy it in a domain of fine art just traditional enough to win your
trust and then hurt you with the truth. Digital art can tell me whatever it wants;
I can take it or leave it. But I can’t leave an emotionally intelligent
oil painting.
This artist’s characters are mostly
children (they might be just the one kid), cats, crows, or turtles, alone or
in small groups and afflicted with various amorphous spiritual ailments. Sun’s
little boys (they do seem male somehow, but I’m not sure why) share the
childlike features of his cats, but their concerns are not those of children.
They are no further from you, as the Koran says of God, than the vein in your
own neck. These protagonists are worried about bleeding, lovesickness, temptations
to suicide, poison, booze, and isolation — though sometimes they also win
through to fantastic unconscious states of flying and swimming and floating.
A curved and intimidating knife appears in a substantial minority of the pictures,
as do empty speech balloons. The frequently bandaged limbs of the cat, the longing
stares, the poignantly silent attempts at interspecies communication between
(for instance) cats and turtles, all point toward Deth Sun’s ownmost issue:
interiority.
In Wiglets, and Not A Second Time, and
plenty of other pictures, a human face peers out from the open mouth of some
other animal — a crow, or a horned monster or more frequently, a cat. So:
there is a self inside the figure. The knife that has cut so many wrists in these
paintings is searching for that evidentiary blood which self-mutilators (“cutters”)
use as the sensuous proof of their own existence. In Deth Sun’s blank speech
balloons, there’s the futile grasping for the ineffible; because the balloons
have no words in them, a painting has occurred in their stead. Here’s one
of my favorite commonplaces of art criticism: images are a substitute for the
impossible language that would completely reveal one person’s inner life
to another. Deth Sun is among those painters whose approach to anonymous intimacy
is so close that its impossible fulfillment lights up the gap.
