Peter Doig
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Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre (2002), the exhibition’s largest painting, at 117 inches wide, can be seen as a commentary on the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. In many Friedrichs two figures stand with their backs to us, looking toward a magical city or a distant sunset and leading the viewer’s eye toward a sublime elsewhere. In Doig’s painting two figures face us, and the walkway behind them leads us toward a seemingly infinite waterway and star-studded sky, then curves off to the right, away from that vastness. The painting is full of fuzzy and tentative smears of paint, yet the colored stones in the walkway walls are painted more precisely and with brighter colors than anything else, helping to direct our attention away from the mysterious background and toward the relatively banal human construction.
The colored patches of the walls could also be taken as a reference to the painter’s task, though in interviews Doig declares that his work is not “painting about painting.” He’s wise to separate himself from analytical and self-referential modernism, yet the modest metaphors for art making he sometimes includes are key to his meaning: he seems to see the painter less as a deliverer of revelation than as a craftsman pointing out the small beauties of the world.
Doig often depicts nature as overwhelming, and balances that idea with mass-culture references, none of which is ever reduced to easy irony. The hooded sketcher in Figure in Mountain Landscape (1998) turns from us to face a swirl of colors, apparently sketching an abstraction that’s related stylistically to the background. The white lines in the figure and the topographic curves in the background suggest a paint-by-numbers picture, creating an endearing mix of the mundane and the sublime.
