Like a sausage in a cage: On Johan Suneson’s drawings and paintings

One thing that sets Johan Suneson apart from most other artists from his generation is his choice of materials. At a time when most of his colleagues are reaching for grander materials to express themselves, Suneson seems to use whatever is available; things he finds around him. Above all else this a question of spontaneity, of innovative necessity. The ideas come first. Often, the material and the expression used to make those ideas concrete appear to be chosen at random, or merely on a whim. There is a distinctive DIY air to Suneson’s realised ideas, and he frequently uses simple and cheap materials such as papier mâché. He usually paints in acrylics because it’s simpler, more immediate.

His spontaneous choice of materials also defines his expression in that he integrates sculptural elements in his paintings, and vice versa. In the painting “Kring Mammasjön” (By Lake Mamma), a roller represents a cloud in the sky; in ”Self Portrait”, the artist himself is obscured by a piece of net. In the two portraits “Mellan väggen och hörnet” (Between the Wall and the Corner), Suneson has literally broken the image’s surface, and the figures peek out in the corners of the fragmented frames. Suneson blurs the borders between sculpture and painting, as he does in many of his other works, for example the monumental sculptures “Mamma- och Pappatrappan”(Mamma- and Pappa Stairs).

One might say that Johan Suneson’s art dematerialises, because the material can often be replaced or substituted, and the idea could have been realised in a number of different ways. This is not only true when it comes to choices such as panel or canvas, acrylics or watercolours, but also choices such as whether an idea will become a sculpture, a painting or a performance. In this text, my main focus is Suneson’s paintings and drawings. His paintings are more ephemeral than his other projects – they are images in constant movement. Suneson has said that he finds it difficult to say that a painting is complete, and that all paintings are changeable.

Like Suneson’s choice of materials, the link between his visual elements is frequently spontaneous, as if determined by serendipity. The images develop along a non-linear associative trajectory on which he makes references to other artists’ work, to poetry or comics. The images are created in a context, within a narrative flow. Suneson’s role is that of master builder, conjoining visual elements.
Improvisation is central and instrumental in everything Suneson does, from performance to painting to sculptural works. His realm of imagery emanates curiosity and the joy of discovery. His images are often humorous, linking him to a tradition of comics and satirical cartoon. There is a fine line between painting and comics in many of Suneson’s pieces. For me, he is a cartoonist who paints.

His artistry bears an affinity to the work of Swedish cartoonists like Joakim Lindengren and Gunnar Lundkvist, and there are also influences from international pioneers like Robert Crumb and George Herriman. Disney is a constantly present universe of visual references. Suneson’s work makes continual references to philosophy, politics, history, and poetry, and most of all to other art. The artists who have inspired Suneson include Philip Guston, Fruls Tilpo, Siri Derkert, Eva Löfdahl, Jarl Ingvarsson, Olle Skagerfors, Helen Chadwick and the Wallda Group’s romantic irony.

The work “Sardinerna vill att burken ska öppnas mot havet” (The Sardines Would Like the Can to Open into The Sea) is a clear example of Suneson’s associative working process. The title itself is from a poem by Werner Aspenström. The threads dangling from the figure’s nose are mooring rope, the eyes are lanterns. The watercolour “Mardrömsköket” (Nightmare Kitchen) is a reference to Dick Bengtsson’s “Hitler och drömköket”, (Hitler’s Dream Kitchen); in “Trädstammar och handdockor” (Treetrunks and Hand Puppets) there is a pair of feet seen from the soles, borrowed from Michelangelo’s “Last Judgement”. In “Intermezzo”, Suneson paints on the frame, like Howard Hodgkin, and a sausage in a cage emerges recurrently in a number of images, borrowed from the Danish cartoonist Storm P’s well-known ad for Tuborg. In the black and white painting “Tuborggubbe” (Tuborg Guy), the figure has a sausage inside his body, which itself resembles a cage. For Suneson, Storm P’s original is a cartoon with tragic content, as both of the vagabonds are clearly alcoholics. The abuse is like a cage. The sausage in the cage reappears in Suneson’s cartoon “Pelleniklas i byen” (Petericles Goes to Town) and in the painting “Opålitlig guide” (Unreliable Guide), where the guide holds a light consisting of a cage containing a sausage.

Anthropomorphism is used to describe when non-human beings or things take on human characteristics. Nik Taylor, professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury, defines anthropomorphism as “the attribution of human characteristics to non-human objects, which include both ’other’ animals and innate objects”. It has been used for thousands of years in literature and religion, not to mention in fables and cartoons in later centuries. Various sorts of anthropomorphs appear frequently in Johan Suneson’s work, and it is easy to interpret that as related to his proximity to cartoons. There are obvious references to Disney characters, perhaps the most widely disseminated anthropomorphs in all of history, for example in the relief “Piff och Puff på spiselkransen” (Chip and Dale on the Chimneypiece), as well as a series of more complex variations where Suneson blurs the borders between objects and humans. In “Opålitlig guide”, a face is at once also a landscape; in “Slutet” (The End), a person is also a hat, and sperm with human faces swim around in “Gommens katedral” (The Palate Cathedral). The body of spectacle-wearing figure in the painting “Kring Mammasjön” is a skyrise, and the Tuborg man in “Tuborggubbe” is a living figure resembling a large cage. In “Intermezzo”, Suneson plays with the definition of the Hindu god Ganesh and his vehicle animal, which is a rat.

Suneson redefines the relationship between human, animal, and thing throughout his artistic work. His absent frames and boundaries are enormously liberating. An element of an image could be nearly anything; this is one of a number of aspects that make his images frequently difficult to understand figuratively and also possible to understand in multiple ways. Suneson’s choices in terms of colours and the absence of perspective also make reading his work more difficult. He doesn’t adhere to the norms for understanding and presentation, but instead creates an interaction between figuration and abstraction that sometimes results in fluid, dreamlike images. There is a drive to go beyond the motive in Suneson’s work. There may be numerous different readings of one and the same motive; sometimes this is unintentional. One example is the painting “Pippisyrsan” (Pippi Cricket); in the centre of the image I see a crow that was clearly influenced by Robert Crumb’s style, but it is actually a little girl, seated and hugging a cricket. Another clear example is the image “Gatans röst” (The Voice of the Street), where I believe that many see a meat grinder from which a long stream of ground meat is flowing. Suneson’s motive was intended to be a megaphone with a long tongue.

Suneson breaks apart the narrative in his visual works with the abstraction of his figuration, but also by breaking down language itself. In a number of his performances with Leif Skoog there is something that I call ’the disintegration of language’. In the performance “Fjärde dimensionen” (The Fourth Dimension), both characters (or more accurately, their heads) each speak every other word. In other performances, the characters speak indistinctly and too quietly. Understanding is less important than the expression. The comics about how Jakob Storhufvud jumps around in time and space are yet another example of how Suneson and Skoog challenge the narrative, and this is also something that Suneson does repeatedly in his paintings and cartoons. The violent and organic drawings in the publication “Idékarusell” (Idea Carousel) are perhaps the most apparent example. Doubling the text in the speech bubbles renders the words difficult to read. The images and words become abstract, and the words ultimately disappear into the landscape.

Johan Suneson breaks down our common language and creates a language of his own on the very outskirts of our comprehension. There is thus a proximity to Dadaism and the Fluxus movement in his work. Instead of creating a language, his wealth of expressions creates several languages at once. Sometimes it seems that many voices are speaking at the same time, and it is difficult to understand what he’s trying to say. But his process also creates a multilingualism, an unbridled river of associations and significance that fills his art with layers, tones and timbres.

1 Nik Taylor’s definition was retrieved from the essay ”Anthropomorphism and the Animal Subject”, part of the anthology ”Anthropocentrism: Humans, Animals, Environments” (Rob Boddice (Ed.), Leiden and Boston 2011).

Isac Nordgren Jonasson