First, it’s one of the best examples of what Surrealism was really all about: depicting dreams on canvas. Think about what most of your dreams are like. What do you usually conclude? That most are disjointed, with a strange, often unsettling, seemingly unrelated collision of scenes and visual elements that somehow, for some reason, occupy the same screen on which the film reel of your mind projects its story. And the subconscious can be a disquieting and confusing place, as well as sexy and fun. Like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get!
Thus, Dali puts a camel in the same environment in which he shows typical landscape details from his native Spanish countryside, including a couple of boats like the ones he and Gala would take leisurely rides in around the Bay of Port Lligat and Cape Creus.
The boy at right is generally thought to be Dali (I’m unconvinced it’s necessarily him), and is shown in dark silhouette that adds another layer of mystery to the dream-like aura of the work. Of course, dreams are generally not murky depictions of what our mind is conjuring up. On the contrary, they’re usually very realistic – which is the perfect opportunity for Dali’s great draftsmanship and photographic painting technique to shine.
So we get a table from the café Le Casino in Cadaques, sporting glasses and spoons, and a Spanish coin, positioned on a tile floor like the one that was reportedly being installed in Dali’s villa at the time he was painting this picture. And all of it, in its precision, looks like a color photograph.
Finally, there’s a discarded Camel cigarette pack near the boy’s feet, a bizarre echo, if you will, of the actual animal at left. Dali expert and author Robert Descharnes noted, in a discussion of “Sun Table”: “In order to stress the out-of-context and obsessive character of a camel with all the magical aspects associated with the animal, Dali wrote later in his book Dix recettes d’immortalite (“Ten Recipes for Immortality”) that ‘seen through an electronic microscope it is possible to demonstrate that a camel is much less precise than a cloud.’”
All seems to contribute to the dream-like atmosphere, mood, madness and magic of this terrific little Dali, painted at the height of his Surrealist period. “Sun Table” — whose title may be a play on sun “dial” — graced the cover of the March 2005 issue of Art in America magazine, in tribute to the centennial of Dali’s birth.