C ountry-rock (wing-mirror) is distinctly Doig: nostalgic without being specifically reminiscent, entrenched in fabled Canadian roots, and characterised by his trademark otherworldliness. The rainbow tunnel off the Don Valley Parkway, or DVP, is a view immediately familiar to any Toronto resident. Situated within a small valley in the parklands that surround the Don River, the tunnel was built in 1961 at the same time as the mammoth six-lane highway that today forms a major artery in and out of the city. A view from the passenger seat of a car, Peter Doig’s mysterious landscape utterly encapsulates the familiar ennui of such peripheral spaces. In concert with the ever-expanding urban sprawl, these places represent a terra incognitaof concrete and shrubland. The rainbow underpass however is a jarring interruption of the cultural no-man’s land that borders the flow of speeding or gridlocked cars. It is a peculiar and mysterious entity: seen by everyone yet uninhabited, it is a decoration that could have been completed by anyone, on an underpass belonging to no one. This is what Doig looks for in his source material: his subject is not personal nostalgia, but the abstract phenomenon of dreams and the concept of nostalgia itself.

Painted in 1999, Country-rock (wing-mirror) is one of Peter Doig’s most recognisable works. Replete with mystery and intrigue, this painting is definitive of the artist’s cinematic visual code; a melding of memory with imagination, landscape with dreamscape, timelessness with the inescapably present. Between 1998 and 2000 Doig would paint three monumental works centred on a vista of the Don Valley rainbow from the highway: one of these is presently in the collection of the PinchukArtCentre in Kiev while the other was chosen as the catalogue cover illustration for the artist’s seminal retrospective at Tate Britain in 2008 and remains in a European private collection.

The present work is distinguished from the other two, however, as the only version to feature a glimpse of the car – via the intrusion of a wing-mirror in the lower left quadrant – from which our viewpoint originates. The spectator is thus a passenger on their way out of the sprawl and into the wild. Doig’s rainbow is a marker, a reminiscent signpost of the wistful space of summertime car journeys, and its title is the soundtrack, the background radio intermingled with the car engine’s drone. Seated next to the driver, the passenger is free to daydream and let thoughts runaway with the speeding traffic; watching a blur of cars and shifting landscape, the window becomes a television screen, a channel for the kind of dream-like trance that travelling induces. In Country-rock (wing-mirror) we are transported into that fantastical realm of reverie, a meditative in-between pregnant with suspense and anticipation, and resigned to the province of memory. Though only featured in three major works, there are countless drawings, watercolours and aquatints that replay, relive and revise this view from the DVP. Affined with the déjà vu-like status of the canoe for its countless reprisals – an engagement famously beginning with White Canoe (1990-91) and continuing through to 100 Years Ago (2001) – the rainbow tunnel is among the most powerfully evocative and universal signifiers of Doig’s practice.

In 1972, just over ten years following its construction, the originally grey façade of this roadside underpass was over-painted with a rainbow. Boldly self-anointed the ‘Caretaker of Dreams’, Berg Johnson was 16 when he first decided to decorate the concrete tunnel that passes underneath a railway line next to the highway. Originally from Norway, Johnson was inspired by the memory of a friend named Sigrid, who died in a tragic car accident nearby. He often would complain to her that people in Toronto “never looked up”, and following her death, endeavoured to do something to “make people smile” (Berg Johnson quoted in: The Toronto Star, 3 November 2012, online resource). His first attempt to paint the tunnel was beset by drama. Having fashioned a support out of rope and lowered himself into position by the tunnel's entrance, he was caught unawares by an approaching train: the fast-moving vehicle cut through the rope and Johnson tumbled down the embankment, breaking his leg in the fall. A class from the nearby Don Mills Middle School helped Johnson to complete the mural shortly afterwards and ever since the DVP rainbow has remained a beloved and unofficial public monument. Following the first incarnation in North York, further rainbow arches began to appear on culverts and tunnels around the Greater Toronto Area. However the original, and the one depicted in Doig’s paintings, is the only one left remaining today.

Though park authorities deemed the mural as vandalism and overpainted it in layers of grey, Johnson would determinedly return over 40 times within the space of 30 years to remove graffiti and restore his mural; a recurrence that would only end when he was issued a no trespassing order in 1994. Now officially sanctioned as public art, local groups have taken up maintenance of the site, covering up the graffiti which has appeared over time with fresh layers of brightly coloured paint. The most recent renovation was undertaken in 2012 with the help of a grant from the City of Toronto and the efforts of Mural Routes, a non-profit organisation that restores public art projects in urban environments. The freshly painted rainbow tunnel was officially ‘re-launched’ at the completion of the project in the presence of local dignitaries and in front of a crowd for whom the mural had come to represent a crucial moment of brightness on a weary commute: a celebrated local monument and repository for over forty years’ worth of memories.

There is a pronounced folkloric dimension to this story that undoubtedly would have captured Doig’s imagination. The tale behind the origin of the rainbow – a story of transformation from concrete carbuncle to roadside symbol of hope – through Johnson’s 30-year maintenance of the site and his battle against park authorities, to the tunnel’s now official integration into the cultural landscape of Toronto, these details collectively spin a folksy yarn of legendary proportion. Indeed, Johnson’s whimsical tale truly of belongs to the realm of Canadian mythology. Undeniably redolent with nostalgia and hippy romanticism, this story is the perfect vehicle for Doig’s portrayal of Canada as a creative realm of free imagination. Intriguingly, Doig only began painting these geographically specific Canadian locations in earnest once he had settled in London in 1989. A heightened almost melancholic sense of dislocation from the Canadian landscape of his youth is thus tenable in his work from the 1990s and early 2000s. As though heralding a return of the repressed, cultural displacement emerges in these works as evocative nostalgia suffused with fantasy.

It has been suggested that Doig’s pronounced fascination with nostalgia is a product of a nomadic life; a product of being born in Scotland, growing up in Canada and settling in London and Trinidad; a product of not really being ‘from’ anywhere. To this end, it is interesting to note the way he has painted Canadian images while living in London and Trinidad – as much attempts to form an identity in a new home, as to commemorate an old one. However, to make this assumption perhaps overly sentimentalises the work and suggests a personal link and a sense of specificity to the artist that is notably absent. Doig has registered his grievance at this narrow interpretation: “people have confused my paintings with being just about my own memories. Of course we cannot escape these. But I am more interested in the idea of memory itself” (Peter Doig quoted in: Richard Shiff, ‘Incidents’, Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Britain, Peter Doig, 2008, p. 21). The rainbow tunnel is a significant subject that would be charged with nostalgia for any resident of Toronto. Doig uses it however to conjure up a sense of general memory – of a fleeting snapshot filled with implication, but devoid of direct connotation. Indeed, this work focuses as much on memory and nostalgia itself, as on the reminiscences of a Canadian artist living in London. It is then through the transient highway setting that Doig is able to hone in on the act of dreamlike recollection.

Country-rock (wing-mirror) is a prime example of the mood which Doig has forged in his painting: an ethereal but tense otherworldliness that suffuses his subjects with a muted numbness. In the planar composition, in the thin texture of the paintwork, and in the suggestion that their scenes may continue beyond the limitations of the canvas, Doig’s works are overtly dreamlike. They are surreal, if not in the semiotic psychoanalytical sense, then in that sense of a blanketed half-remembered detail. So often, when we experience a sense of misplaced familiarity, we attribute it to a dream. With this mundane and universally recognised highway setting, Doig imparts that same sense of familiarity into his work, and from it we make the same attribution: that this is not a work of memory, but rather a dream transposed.

At once universally familiar and discordant, Doig’s picture bestows a strangely recognisable yet irretrievable past that compounds a reading of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny. Congruent to this psychological state, there is an atmospheric disturbance present within the most powerful of Doig’s painted landscapes: fragments of recollected autobiography combined with hallucinatory fiction and the isolating feeling of suspended time confer an underlying threat, a case of jarring homeliness. In Country-rock (wing-mirror) a hint of trepidation is cloaked in jovial rainbow colours.

The vibrant colours of the rainbow arch in Doig's painting appear superimposed against the green expanse of the verge; this culvert seems to weightlessly balance upon the white barrier that divides the tunnel from the road. Overhead telegraph wires pass through the tops of trees through which medium-rise buildings are just visible above the foliage. The deep blackness of the tunnel’s centre is enigmatic, at once suggestive of an entrance to another world whilst simultaneously evoking the threatening portent of an isolated and unlit tunnel in the midst of the urban sprawl. As the artist has explained: “A lot of the works deal with peripheral or marginal sites, places where the urban world meets the natural world. Where the urban elements almost become, literally, abstract devices. There a lot of ‘voids’ in the paintings. A lot of the paintings portray a sense of optimism that can often be read as being a little desperate, like the image of a rainbow painted around the entrance to an underpass” (Peter Doig in conversation with Matthew Higgs in: Adrian Searle, Kitty Scott, Catherine Grenier, Peter Doig London 2007, p. 139).

In Doig's juxtaposition of the man-made and the natural, perhaps a comparison with J.M.W. Turner is apt. Where Turner painted hints of steam engines and railways within a sublime landscape setting, he highlighted the encroachment of the industrial age upon an Arcadian ideal. Analogously in Doig’s work, landscape becomes a reflective symbiosis of mythology and urban reality: screens of static distort our view, telegraph poles cut through foliage and, as in the present work, a concrete motorway courses through the constituent elements of a Romantic landscape. The rainbow in particular is a historical feature of traditional paintings of sublime nature. As prominent in works by Turner, John Constable and Caspar David Friedrich, the rainbow is an articulation of divine glory. Doig’s use of the trope however, in line with Gerhard Richter’s parodic photo-mediated treatment, evinces the marked post-modernism of his painterly enterprise.

Utterly eclectic, Doig’s practice is thoroughly entrenched within our contemporary image and media-saturated moment. Akin to Richter’s aforementioned corpus of Photo Paintings, and bearing a strong affinity with the archival methodology of Francis Bacon, Doig’s studio based practice utilises a vast archive of images collated from newspapers, postcards, film and album covers, as well as a stock of his own video footage and photography. The composition for Country-rock (wing-mirror) is structurally anchored to the artist’s own photographs of the rainbow tunnel and is accordingly imbued with the kind of atmospheric glow that old photographs possess. Nonetheless, Doig was also thinking specifically about a particular Edward Hopper painting, Approaching a City (1946) in which a railway moves inexorably towards the depths of a curved tunnel. The converging perspective and slight arch of the railway tunnel set against a row of apartment buildings are all elements that find their parity in the present work, however it is the stark inference of isolation and bareness that chimes most resonantly. In this sense Doig was also greatly influenced by the work of Edvard Munch: the melancholic and tense atmosphere and dreamlike treatment of line and colour present within works such as Red Virginia Creeper (1898-1900) reveal parallels with the psychological stimulus for Doig’s own work. At once enmeshing elements derived from art history, autobiography and a contemporary experience of non-stop visual saturation, Doig taps into a collective virtual-memory.

Significantly, this picture narrates a crucial turning point in Doig’s oeuvre. Moving away from the matrix of dense painterly layers that provide a videotic static to the earlier Canadian winter-landscapes, towards the end of the 1990s the works begin to possess an aqueous clarity and delicately diffusive quality. A catalytic masterpiece that illustrates this crucial transformation, this painting precedes comparable examples in major public institutions: Gastof zur Muldentalsperre (2000-02) on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, Music of the Future (2002-07) housed in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, and 100 Years Ago (2001) in the collection of the Pomipdou Centre, Paris. Rather than looking through screens of interlocking patterns and painterly veils, Country-rock (wing-mirror) and its counterparts exude a translucency and openness that in turn reinforces the hazy atmosphere of sepia-toned nostalgia and bleary-eyed remembrance of a dream.

The triumph of Country-rock (wing-mirror) emphatically resides in its dreamscape synthesis of heady atmosphere, collective-memory and emotive nostalgia tinged and countered by minor discord. There is a visual suspension between the imaginary and the documentary, the autobiographically specific and culturally multifarious all of which flow within the ethereal reverie of this painting’s exquisite facture. In Country-rock (wing-mirror) Doig confers a fascinating and otherworldly symposium of the homely and peculiar.

彼 得・多伊格的《鄉村搖滾（後視鏡）》植根於加拿大本土民間故事，帶有懷舊幽思卻又不過分沉迷過去，加上藝術家標誌性的夢幻之感，風格鮮明易辨。本作所描繪的彩虹隧道對於加拿大多倫多的居民來說定不會陌生──這道「彩虹」懸掛在1961年建成的當河谷園林公路旁隧道之上，而共有六條車道的高速公路如今已成為進出多倫多的主要幹道。本作所描繪的畫面，是車輛在高速公路上行駛時乘客望向窗外所見的景象。大型基建標示城市的擴展，千篇一律的水泥建築慢慢侵吞城郊的灌木地，形成尚未記錄的新地貌，神秘而帶點過分熟悉的厭倦。一道亮麗的彩虹在此高高懸掛，在這個車輛來去匆匆的文化空白地帶橫空出現，突兀而鮮明奪目。這是別樹一幟而神祕莫測的存在：千千萬萬的人在此經過，目光不由自主受其吸引，可這道彩虹卻畫在不屬於任何人的地下通道之上，隨便一個路人亦可繪畫同一圖案。這種矛盾就是多伊格在他的原材料中所探尋的特質──他的創作主題並非個人情懷，而是抽象的夢境與懷緬過去的概念。

1999年所畫的《鄉村搖滾（後視鏡）》是彼得・多伊格最為人熟悉的作品之一。本作富含藝術家最經典的電影美學視覺符號，融匯記憶與想像、實境與夢境，以及永恆與當下，畫面充斥著無法言喻的神祕之感。1998至2000年間，多伊格以當河谷園林公路旁地下隧道上的彩虹為題，創作了三幅鉅幅畫作，其中一幅現展於烏克蘭基輔的平丘克藝術中心，另外一幅則一直藏於歐洲私人收藏，曾獲選為2008年泰特英國藝術館舉辦的多伊格回顧展展覽圖錄封面。本作與其餘兩幅相比，卻更為獨特──這是唯一畫上車輛一角的作品。畫面左下角露出的後視鏡讓觀者代入這幅畫作的視線與角度，彷彿我們就坐在駕駛座旁邊，在夏日正盛之際駛離城市，走進郊野，展開輕鬆愉快的夏日旅程。畫面上方亮麗的彩虹象徵這趟讓人懷念的車上旅程，而題目中提到的鄉村搖滾，就是路途上播放的背景音樂。車裡充斥著鄉村搖滾混合車輛行駛時引擎的低頻噪音，我們看著窗外呼嘯而過的車輛與變幻無常的景色，輕鬆寫意。車窗成為了電視屏幕，播放車輛高速前行時閃過的模糊景象，彷如夢境般難以觸碰。《鄉村搖滾（後視鏡）》將觀者帶進夢境與記憶交疊的奇幻結界，懸浮在起點與終點之間，讓人滿懷期待。這條彩虹隧道雖然只出現在三幅大型畫作之上，但無數素描、水彩和蝕刻細點版畫卻將此情此景不斷重複呈現於觀者眼前。彩虹隧道的圖案廣獲傳頌，成為藝術家作品中最具辨識度和影響力的標誌之一。多伊格作品中另一個為人熟知的標誌，就是水中的獨木舟。這個主題自1990至1991年作的《白色獨木舟》（White Canoe）起開始在藝術家的作品中反覆出現，到2001年作的《百年以前》（100 Years Ago）方止。

畫中的美麗彩虹背後是一段感人的故事。1972年，地下隧道建成的十年剛過，原本灰白一片的建築上畫上了一道亮麗彩虹。當時年僅十六歲、來自挪威的伯格・約翰遜（Berg Johnson）的一位好友在隧道附近因交通意外逝世，而約翰遜曾在這位友人生前向她多次訴說多倫多人「從不抬頭仰望」。在好友離世後，他決定做點甚麼來「讓別人微笑」，因而自稱「夢境守護者」，在高速公路旁路軌下的水泥隧道上方繪畫彩虹（引述伯格・約翰遜，摘自《The Toronto Star》，2012年11月3日，網上）。他的起步相當不順──他把繩索固定在路軌上，把自己吊下隧道入口，卻被經過的火車割斷繩索，跌下河堤，摔斷了一條腿。雖然開端並不美好，但很快鄰近學校就有學生加入計劃，助約翰遜完成作品。自此，這道懸掛在地下隧道上的彩虹就成為當地人珍愛的非正式地標，而同樣的彩虹亦陸續在大多倫多地區不同的排水道與隧道上出現。時至今日，只有最初位於當河谷園林公路旁隧道之上的彩虹作品尚存於世，但保存這道彩虹也絕不容易。園林管理部門認為作品屬於蓄意毀壞，派人在彩虹之上髹上灰色油漆，加上不少人在作品上塗鴉，約翰遜在三十年裡重新繪畫和修補這道彩虹超過四十次，直至1994年被政府明令禁制才停止。如今，這幅牆上作品已獲政府承認為公眾藝術，本地團體亦自發保護作品，重新髹上繽紛油漆蓋過不斷出現的塗鴉。最近一次修繕由致力重修公眾藝術作品的非牟利團體 Mural Routes 主導，在2012年獲多倫多市撥款資助下進行。彩虹隧道重新揭幕當天，不少當地市民親臨見證，可見這一抹亮麗色彩已經成為沉悶車程中讓人期待的景點，亦是逾四十年來連結當地社區的著名地標。

這段富有民間故事色彩的歷史無疑深深吸引著多伊格，亦啟發了他的創意與想像。一條平凡沉悶的水泥隧道，只畫上了一道彩虹，就搖身一變成為多倫多的亮麗風景，甚至成為路邊上的一個希望的象徵，再加上約翰遜長達三十年的不懈堅持，編織了一段屬於加拿大的現代民間傳奇。如此奇幻又帶點嬉皮士式浪漫的往事，對於多伊格來說成為了發揮自由想像的絕佳空間，讓他可無拘無束地描繪印象中的加拿大。有趣的是，藝術家在1989年從加拿大搬到倫敦後，方始熱衷於繪畫加拿大獨有的風景。在1990至2000年代初，他的作品似乎都在高聲述說他在離開成長時期所居住的加拿大後無處排解的憂愁。這個時期的作品都瀰漫著滿滿愁緒且帶有奇幻色彩，彷彿預示著文化錯位所帶來的不安無法再壓抑隱去，將如山洪暴發般席捲而來。

多伊格對緬懷過去的執著或可視為他四處漂泊的生活方式所帶來的影響。他生於蘇格蘭，在加拿大長大，又先後居於倫敦與特立尼達，似乎從未在一處定居，亦未曾真正屬於任何一個地方。在這個前提下，他身處倫敦與特立尼達時方始繪畫加拿大景色，可解讀為紀念舊居之舉，亦可視為在新居重新建立身分的嘗試。話雖如此，這個解讀卻有為作品植入主觀情緒之嫌，強行在藝術家與作品之間加諸個人的情感聯繫。多伊格曾明確表示他對這個狹隘解讀的不滿：「大家錯把我的畫作當成是只屬於我的個人記憶。當然，我們無法逃避自身記憶，但我其實對記憶這一整體概念更感興趣。」（引述彼得・多伊格，摘自理查・希夫所撰〈Incidents〉，「Peter Doig」展覽圖錄，倫敦，泰特英國藝術館，2008年，頁21）。本作中的彩虹隧道並不只象徵多伊格的個人回憶，而是所有多倫多居民的集體記憶。藝術家巧妙運用這個圖案，無需刻意點明，就能讓大家共同憶起富有情懷的片段。事實上，本作的重點有二，一為記憶與懷舊的概念，二為身在倫敦的加拿大藝術家的回憶與愁緒。藝術家透過熙來攘往的高速公路，打造如夢似幻的回憶秘境。

《鄉村搖滾（後視鏡）》營造出虛幻縹緲卻又暗藏洶湧的氛圍，為畫中景致隱晦地注入令人麻木之感，是藝術家的頂尖傑作。他在平面之上薄施油彩，以稀薄的質感，加之畫面未止於畫框邊界的暗示，使作品搖身化為朦朧夢境，讓人深陷其中。多伊格的作品都具有超現實的特徵，這種超現實或許不符心理學上以符號作心理暗示的學術定義，但模糊的記憶和難以釐清的細節，卻讓素未謀面卻又似曾相識的感覺幻化為夢中所見的超現實情景。多伊格在本作中憑藉隨處可見、普通不過的高速公路，為作品注入熟悉之感。這種既熟悉又陌生的感覺，促使我們將作品歸類為錯置的夢境，而非真實記憶。如此解讀似乎與西格蒙德・弗洛伊德的詭秘論調不謀而合。多伊格渲染力最盛的風景畫中，美好靜謐的氛圍總帶有一絲不協調：自傳般的記憶碎片，加上虛幻想像和時間停頓下遺世獨立的孤寂，醞釀出格格不入的歲月靜好之感。本作中暗藏的躁動不安，就掩蓋在愉悅亮麗的彩虹色之下。

多伊格的畫中彩虹顏色鮮豔，彷彿疊加在路邊淡綠色的草坡之上，鮮明而突出。坡上的高壓電纜經過茂密樹冠，綠植背後是隱約的建築。畫面中間是一道白色圍欄，圍欄之上是隧道洞口，圍欄之下是高速公路。隧道口漆黑一片，神祕莫測，似乎是通往其他世界的入口，亦讓人想起都市之中燈光微弱的恐怖隧道。藝術家解釋道：「許多作品都與在城市與自然接壤的邊沿之地有關。在這些交界，城市元素幾乎成為抽象手法。畫中帶有許多『空洞』。許多畫作都展現近乎過分積極的樂觀心態，就比如在地下隧道的入口畫上彩虹圖案一般。」（引述彼得・多伊格與馬修・希格斯（Matthew Higgs）的對話，摘自阿德里安・瑟爾、基蒂・斯科特（Kitty Scott）及凱瑟琳・格雷尼爾（Catherine Grenier）所撰《Peter Doig》，2007年，頁139）。

這種將人造物與大自然相鄰而置作鮮明對比的畫作，與約瑟夫・馬洛德・威廉・泰納的作品可作對比。泰納在波瀾壯闊的風景畫中畫上蒸氣引擎和鐵路的一角，凸顯當時工業革命蠶食鄉村野趣的現象。以這個解讀類比多伊格的作品，風景就成為了一面鏡，反映神話與當今城貌的共生型態，比如車窗扭曲窗外的自然景象、電纜與電線桿穿過樹叢，又或如本作中水泥車道貫穿帶浪漫時期風格的自然景色。在描繪壯麗風光的傳統風景畫作中，彩虹是歷史悠久的常見圖案，而在泰納、約翰・康斯特勃和賈斯帕・大衛・費得利奇的畫作中，彩虹更是神聖光輝的象徵。多伊格雖運用古老的圖案象徵，卻一如格哈德・里希特般以攝影為藍本作寫實繪畫，結合古今元素創作富有後現代主義色彩的作品。

《鄉村搖滾（後視鏡）》是多伊格藝術生涯中別具意義之作，標誌著他在風格上的重大轉變。他早期喜愛以重重濃厚顏料鋪就帶影片質感的加拿大冬日風景畫，到1990年代末開始在作品中營造水瑩透亮、輕盈細膩之感。本作的創作年份早於多幅現存於大型博物館裡的近例，包括芝加哥藝術博物館的《梅登圖斯畢爾旅館》（Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre）（2000-2002年作）、胡姆勒拜客路易斯安那現代藝術博物館的《未來之樂》（Music of the Future）（2000-2007年作），以及巴黎龐畢度中心的《百年以前》（100 Years Ago）。《鄉村搖滾（後視鏡）》與多伊格其後風格相類的作品都散發著透亮與舒坦的感覺，夢境中濃重的懷舊幽情與醒後回憶夢境時的懵懂模糊，都共同營造出虛幻朦朧的氛圍。

本作的出彩之處，在於其成功結合集體回憶與緬懷之情，再滲入少許不協調的元素，營造出如夢似幻的氛圍。精心構造的夢中幻境，是想像與寫實之間的交疊地帶，對藝術家個人和不同文化背景的觀者具有不同意義。《鄉村搖滾（後視鏡）》是多伊格融匯平凡與奇幻的作品，捕捉了緬懷過去那種既熟悉又陌生的半夢半醒之感。