Peter Doig

Peter Doig is a mystical type, perhaps a visionary. His choice of subject matter is deceptively simple, even banal; but in his eyes and under his brush, a brightly painted wall beside a road becomes a signpost to paradise, a seated figure is transformed into a seer or a prophet, and a man bathing in a tidal pool appears to be the first human to emerge from the primordial ooze. Two years ago Doig and his family moved from London to the island of Trinidad, and the setting of this new series of paintings is recognizably tropical. Yet no matter how specific in their details, Doig's paintings seem to exist outside of time, in another place contiguous with our own but one not meant to reflect or recapitulate reality. Perhaps equating the plasticity of the painter's medium with the hallucinatory effects of psychedelics or of magical fairy dust, Doig achieves this otherworldly quality through painterly pyrotechnics, including staining, dripping, stippling, and a palette of electric colors used in vibrating combinations.

Selected Bibliography:

Charley's Space. Exhibition catalogue. Maastricht, Netherlands: Bonnefanten Museum, 2003.

Parkett, no. 67 (2003): 54–89. Special section, including essays by Paul Bonaventura, Rudi Fuchs, and Beatrix Ruf.

Peter Doig: Metropolitain. Exhibition catalogue. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2001.

Peter Doig. Exhibition catalogue. Munich: Pinakothek der Moderne, 2004.

Ruf, Beatrix. Peter Doig: Version. Exhibition catalogue. Glarus, Switzerland: Kunsthaus Glarus, 1999.

Links:

Bonnefanten Museum exhibition

Contemporary Magazine article