Peter Doig

Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Naples

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is softer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are some very faint drying craquelure to the centre of the bottom section of the circular green pond (visible in the catalogue illustration). No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Clearlight belongs to the acclaimed series of winter landscapes inspired by the artist's upbringing in the snowy expanse of the Canadian landscape. In it, and on an unusually intimate format, Doig revisits and develops many of the techniques and ideas found in some of his most iconic and monumental snow-scape compositions from the early 1990s.

Doig's approach to painting landscapes is staunchly individual, finding inspiration from a transient and constantly evolving combination of sources that draws indiscriminately upon his own memories, photographs and films, and the daily saturation of images provided by the mass media. "The imagination has to be fuelled by image," explains Doig. "I'm interested in the mediated, almost clichéd notions of a pastoral landscape, in how notions about the landscape are manifested and reinforced in, say advertising or film. Yet at the same time many of the paintings are rooted in my own experience of the landscape. All of the paintings have an element of autobiography in them, but I resist making the autobiographical reading overly specific." (Peter Doig cited in: 'Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract), 2001', in Adrian Searle, Kitty Scott & Katherine Grenier, Eds., Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 131) The images created by this amalgam of influences are characterised by their mysterious twilight mood and the acute narrative tensions they evoke. This is always balanced by the visceral intensity of Doig's painted surfaces which frequently combine and juxtapose techniques borrowed from art history within a single image.

There is a conceptual edge to Doig's approach to painting in his repeated use of motifs and subjects in various different guises and combinations. Central to this are his drawings and works on paper in which individual ideas are isolated and explored, sometimes becoming the inspiration for monumental paintings and entirely new directions in his work.

Doig is regarded internationally as being amongst the most influential artists of his generation and his work resides in many of the most important public and private collections around the world. Long overdue, the current major survey of his work at the Tate Modern spans more than two decades of work and shows him to be a constant innovator who has continued to develop and explore the power and infinite possibilities of the painted medium.