| Contrary
to his hooded figure, Peter Doig does not sit in
the landscape reconstructing the romantic image
of the painter in nature. His own and other
people's photographs, the sum total of the media
image archives, the images of art history, the
cinema, music, architecture, sports, landscapes
-they are all realities in his studio that call
forth but do not model his paintings. In his
works, these realities overlap, generating the
present as a juncture of places, times, ideas and
styles. In the composition, all the methods of
image generation from photography, film, and
painting, as well as painterly reproduction
techniques are used: the optical options of
photography make use of perspectives, relations
of size, and segmentation; his painterly
technique uses all the artifice of art history:
the specific styles of Segantini, van Gogh, Munch
and Edward Hopper appear just as much as
pointillist effects, impressionist traits,
Pollockian all-over patterns, clumsily-naive
illustrative techniques, or water colour effects
painted in oil. In so doing, Doig's painting
insists on the triviality of painting as such,
allowing itself to become hypersensitive, or
smudging its contours, or cancelling itself out.
The gaudiness of the paintings is both unnatural
and non-synthetic it is equally informed by the
multitude of images that exist of the world, be
that due to the varying impressions of light and
colour which photographs, video or film images
have supplied of reality, be that by the
multitude of means used in painting to underline
its impressionist, expressionist, realist or
surreal aspects, depending on its point of view.
Like their representational nature, the gaudiness
of these paintings does not underpin their
function of representation but works as a further
reinforcement of their evocative dimension.
Perhaps it is best seen to function like the
musical score to a film - we see a house, a
deserted wood, there may even be someone; but
what has just happened or might be about to
happen is "told" by the music. (This is
why, if the tension in a horror movie becomes
unbearable, it is more effective to cover one's
ears than to shut one's eyes...). |
|
"Daytime Astronomy", 1997-98
oil on linen |
Doig's
images are saturated with the variety of our
memories. They are visually effective precisely
because they do not show any one specific place,
or landscape, our last winter holidays. Looking
at them evokes a film-like movement of images,
which is a movement from memory, and might best
be associated to Jorge Luis Borges's idea that
all art strives towards the state of music. In
Doig's images we enter spaces that appeal to
several senses at once, because they operate with
the structure of our memory, because a smell, a
colour, the accidental collision of a familiar
architectural detail with a detail from a
landscape can set in motion our own, individual
"films." While Peter Doig's paintings
are representational, they still manage to
downplay the discussions of autonomy,
representational function, or abstraction in
painting that had been raised in the modern era.
They are simultaneously representational,
narrative, and abstract, recalling familiar
elements from art history and from reality. Since
they make use of all the means of the medium
without representing them, they have left behind
them the circling around the issues of its
potentialities. Therefore, his work is not a
reverence to media, styles, or art discussions,
but creates a new relationship between painting
and reality, one that has to be determined anew,
and whose point of reference is the viewer's own
experience. Arid so, issues relating to the
medium are resolved in favour of the view of the
image, releasing it into our imagination.
In this sense, Doig's paintings always pay homage
to the quality that images can offer. Their
"virtuosity," however; is very
discreet, keeping the paintings themselves and
their contents in a delicate balance: in our
existence, Rock'n'Roll, Monet, Pollock and Winter
Sports are all relevant and of equal value. Beatrix Ruf
|
|
"Thirteen (Pool Painting)", 1998-99
oil on linen |
