Peter Doig

Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Private Collection, Switzerland

London, Victoria Miro Gallery, Peter Doig: Freestyle, 1996

"I often use heightened colours to create a sense of the experience or mood or feeling of being there... We have all seen incredible sunsets. We've all experienced the sensation of light dropping and producing strange natural effects and I think in a way I am using these natural phenomena and amplifying them through the materiality of paint and the activity of painting. When I was making the 'snow' paintings I was looking at Monet, where there is this incredibly extreme, apparently exaggerated use of colour." The artist cited in Adrian Searle, Kitty Scott and Catherine Grenier, Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 132.

First exhibited in 1996 at Peter Doig's second solo show at the Victoria Miro Gallery, London, Orange Sunshine is an electrifying work from the artist's highly acclaimed series of snow scenes. Short listed for the Turner Prize in 1994 and with successful one-man exhibitions on both sides of Atlantic under his belt, by the time Doig embarked on this suite of snow paintings he had hit his creative zenith. Reminiscent of Claude Monet's majestic depictions of poplars, this towering, colour-drenched canvas reveals Doig's complete technical mastery of light, colour and the stuff of paint.

In the present work, a cluster of tall red pines stands silhouetted against a vivid orange sky flecked with iridescent flakes of falling snow. Standing before the painting, the beholder is immediately struck by the engulfing scale of the mountain landscape. The low horizon line made up of a range of snowcapped peaks locates us at altitude, just below the tree line, surrounded by the great expanse of thin air which fills the top two thirds of the composition. Deliberately engaging with the grand tradition of landscape painting, Doig powerfully evokes the romanticised mountain wildernesses of Caspar David Friedrich in which the godforsaken wandering soul is dwarfed and isolated by the might of nature. While other works in the exhibition, such as Saint Anton (Flat Light) 1995-96, depicted the mountain at a distance from the viewer, by the sheer scale and perspective of Orange Sunshine, Doig positions the viewer himself in the position of Friedrich's awe-inspired protagonist.

 If the landscape itself recalls German Romanticism, Doig's heightened palette is more redolent of the Fauvists' emotionally engaged and liberated use of colour, or the saturated hues that characterize the paintings of the Canadian Group of Seven, in particular Tom Thompson. Doig spent much of his youth in Canada and he acknowledges this avant-garde of Canadian modernism as an important influence on his work. Scouring the vast deserted habitats in a painterly journey of self discovery, the Group of Seven sought to paint where no man had set foot before. By contrast, in Doig's painting, the stillness of the untamed mountain idyll is broken by the silhouetted form of a snowboarder, mid tail-grab, picked out against the dazzling sun in the upper centre of the composition, ironically subverting the Romanticist notion of the insignificance of man before untamed nature.

 Navigating the ever-shifting territory between representation and abstraction, in Orange Sunshine Doig fuses techniques studied from art history with overtly contemporary images, mining the rich seam between painting and photography, between the popular and the sublime. Doig is primarily an imagistic painter and works from a visual archive of pictures and photographs culled from newspapers, postcards, film and album covers. Following in the tradition of Gerhard Richter's photo-paintings of the 1960s which took found photographic images as their source, Doig uses photographs in his innovative, studio-based approach to image making. Unlike his plein air fore-fathers a century before him, distance and detachment from his subject are essential prerequisites of Doig's artistic practice which links art historical referents, images from his expansive visual repertoire and childhood recollections of the Canadian landscape in a concatenation of events condensed into a single, breath-taking image.

In Orange Sunshine, the snowboarder is frozen mid-flight by the shutter of a camera or the freeze-frame button on a video recorder before being transferred onto canvas. Together with the dramatic cropping characteristic of sports photography, this lends the work a filmic quality which acknowledges its overtly contemporary genesis. By borrowing simultaneously from film and photography, Doig creates a poignant sense of crescendo and stillness, the pregnant moment at the apex of the jumper's arc at the split second before he starts his descent. As he stands before this majestic spectacle, the viewer shares in the exhilaration of his flight.

Yet despite the twentieth-century subject-matter, the art historical paradigm is never far from the picture's surface, and here the form of the snowboarder is set against a sophisticated exploration of late afternoon mountain light worthy of Monet's studies of haystacks. Meanwhile, the paintings surface, built up of layer upon layer of pigment, recalls Monet's more abstract Nymphéas painted at Giverny. At times translucent, the oils seep and bleed into one another, at times running down the canvas in serendipitous arabesques. Elsewhere the surface positively glistens, as in the sky where flecks of white paint create a snowstorm that draw our eye back to the picture's surface. More pertinent still, the form of the snowboarder seemingly dematerialises against this intense orange halo, dissolving into abstraction in an emotionally charged chromatic display which achieves the visceral power of Mark Rothko's 'Abstract Sublime'.

Doig is today universally recognised as a pacemaker of his generation, an unerring champion of the relevance of oil painting in our increasingly media-saturated visual environment. Orange Sunshine offers an undisputed master class in his painterly vision. Meshing together contemporary imagery with the lessons of art history, Doig plugs into a nostalgia that photography alone could never capture: the sheer physicality of his paintings' surfaces combined with his overtly contemporary imagery signals his intention to continue the genre of landscape painting while substantially changing its representational and symbolic values.