Through decades of his practice, Peter Doig has masterfully woven together staggeringly disparate points of reference in his inimitable, whimsical landscapes. Borrowing from a rich lineage of landscape painting, snapshots of personal memory and clippings of contemporary visual culture, Doig’s canvases offer a veritable treasure trove of pictorial reference points. Executed in 2006, in Saut d’Eau Doig lays his visual reference points bare, the canvas offers a veritable road map navigating the viewer through Doig’s artistic process.

In the present work, art historical references and quotations battle across the canvas. The biomorphic forms that anchor the compositional structure in Saut d’Eau undoubtedly speak to Edward Munch’s anguished and alluring Norwegian landscapes. Yet, the magnificent and formidable quality of the ocean stretching into the horizon in the present work, calls to mind David Casper Friedrich’s existentialist landscapes. Perhaps also there is a trace of Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian landscapes in Saut d’Eau’s somewhat sanguine and saturated colour palette. It is not only the great masters of the landscape tradition that appear in Saut d’Eau: the vibrating bands of turquoise, blue and green refute conventional perspective and divide the picture surface in a composition reminiscent of the expansive canvases of Mark Rothko and the colour field painters. Despite the present work’s intimate scale, it seems clear that one could spend hours teasing apart the threads of reference that weave through Doig’s canvas.

There is more at play in Saut d’Eau than an encyclopedic survey of Art History. Doig’s visual language comprises a unique amalgamation of these romantic landscape traditions, as well as record covers, vintage postcards, the artist’s own photographic archive and personal experience. The result is as wonderfully ambiguous as it is cinematic. Nicholas Serota, former director of Tate, described this quality in Doig’s painting as “a kind of mythical quality that’s both ancient and very, very modern” (Nicholas Serota quoted in Calvin Tomkins, ‘The Mythical Stories in Peter Doig’s paintings’, The New Yorker, 4 December 2017, online). While Saut d’Eau is geographically situatedin a small island off the coast of Trinidad, there is certainly a blurred line between reality and fantasy. Like many of Doig’s paintings, the present work exudes a distinctive sense of transience. This ocean view from Trinidad seems to carry with it the artist’s personal experience migrating from Canada, to the United Kingdom to Trinidad, and his visual memories in each of these places. This is particularly notable in the artist’s approach to colour, Doig reflects: “I often use heightened colors to create a sense of the experience or mood or feeling of being there, but it’s not a scientific process. I think the paintings always refer back to a reality that we all have experience of. We have all seen incredible sunsets… I am using these natural phenomena and amplifying them through the materiality of paint and the activity of painting.” (Richard Shiff and Catherine Lampert, Peter Doig, New York 2016, p. 316)

It is this unique amalgamation of the highly personal and the completely ambiguous that is so captivating and exceptional in Doig’s practice. Saut d’Eau offers a superb example of the mesmerising grace to Doig’s weaving of these myriad sensorial and visual allusions.