Victoria Miro Gallery, London
13 April – 22 May 2002
www.victoria-miro.com
Peter Doig is essentially a painter of landscapes. Depicting an imaginary and highly romantic wilderness that seems to merge a strangely suburban vision with the natural wonders of the Canadian frontier, Doig’s paintings project a calm, peaceful and somewhat psychedelic dream world. This is not the hard-angled, brilliantly coloured and disorientating psychedelia of the sixties, however, but more a flashback from some other life rendered with the gentle clarity of an opiate dream. Often forming the source of several of his paintings, Doig’s images not only have the potency of a recurring dream, but are rendered in a hazy yet assured style that has the unique effect of making them seem both imaginary and half-remembered. In addition, they have a quiet insistence about them that has led to Doig gaining recognition in a slow but steady way at a time when many of his contemporaries have been catapulted into the limelight.
Doig, who was nominated for the Turner
Prize in 1994, is certainly no newcomer, but it is only since the sale of
his 1990 painting Swamped for over £300,000 at auction in February this year
that he has become widely recognised as one of the hottest properties on the
London scene. As a result, his latest exhibition at the Victoria Miro
gallery has been one of the most eagerly anticipated gallery shows of the
year.
Called One Hundred Years Ago after the title of one of the paintings in the
show, the exhibition presents around ten of Doig’s most recent large
paintings along with six or seven smaller works in oil and watercolour.
Containing a number of pieces (among them House of Pictures, Country Rock
and One Hundred Years Ago) that are re-visitations of subjects that Doig has
painted before, this is an exhibition of few surprises, but one that reveals
an artist in enviable control of his aesthetic. Each of the above three
paintings seems the definitive version, but it is Doig’s habit to revisit
his subjects, slowly refining each until the work becomes undeniably infused
with a specific ambience; a unique mood that is surely related to the
initial jolt of recognition within himself that these key images provoked
when Doig first encountered them.
Forming the point of departure for his painting, Doig’s source material
(usually photographic) is an essential part of his work and one that he is
keen to acknowledge, often incorporating it and other documentary evidence
of his working process into his exhibitions. Towards this end, the catalogue
that accompanies One Hundred Years Ago consists entirely of photographs
documenting the progress of several paintings in the exhibition as they grew
in Doig’s studio. Doig often has to modify and obscure such source material
(by various means, including painting over it or photocopying it, for
example) in order to bring it to a point whereby the essence of the image is
preserved but the means of its rendering is subverted. It is only then, it
seems, that Doig can begin to paint from it, and only at this point, he
believes, that the adventure of his painting begins.
Doig’s painting itself is like a chemical process, a kind of distilling and refining of the image, bringing it to a point where its visual resonance seems at its most potent. There is no magic trickster-like brushwork, no flamboyant ease of delineation in his style: Doig is clearly an artist who has cautiously developed his ability over time and intends to continue in this way. Consequently it often seems as if Doig has uncovered his imagery hidden within the canvas rather than having actually imposed it onto the blank surface. A particularly strong and atmospheric work in this respect is Driftwood; a highlight of the show and a beach scene in which two sunbathers seem to have been mentally projected by the viewer in amongst the material flotsam that litters the seeming infinite space of the beach. Like Girl in White Trees – depicting a young innocent entangled in a myriad flow of branches – the dreamlike imagery of Driftwood seems to speak romantically about the transient nature of human life, the preciousness of memory and the importance of dreams. It also clearly reveals Doig as one of the most interesting painters working today.
Robert Brown