Thirteen (Pool Painting)

Peter Doig, one of Britain's foremost contemporary painters, possesses an intriguing artistic vision that is neither utopian nor dystopian, but more "a Zen-enhanced view of non-events taking place in nowhere lands." (P. O'Kane, in: 'Post Media', 1999.) "He 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. "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... 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." (B. Ruf, in: 'Beat, Pollock and Watersport', in: 'Peter Doig. Version', Glarus 1999.)