Peter Doig

Victoria Miro, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2002

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. The catalogue illustration fails to fully convey the subtleties of the pink and purple hues in the background, apparent throughout in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Upon very close inspection there is minor wear to the lower two extreme corner tips. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Peter Doig's early life in Canada and the vast deserted landscapes of that country had a profound effect on his artistic vision. Here, man's insignificance in nature became abundantly clear in comparison to the man-made advanced capitalist landscape of London, which the artist moved to in the 1980s.  It is the dramatic contrasts between these two opposing habitats which combine powerfully in Doig's work. Highly influenced by the grand tradition of landscape painting in the cannon of art history, from Peter Breughel and Gustav Klimt to the Impressionists and the Canadian Group of Seven painters in the early 20^th Century, Doig mixes these inspirations with his passion for film, photography and music to create exquisite paintings with a distinctive Post Modern sensibility.

In the present work, the snow and wooded scenery of Doig's native Canada is delicately evoked. The composition is built from layers of pigment, where shadowed angular trees depicted in luminous greens are veiled by a flurry of snowflakes formed from the dotted impasto of white pigment. At the forefront of this eerie landscape, an isolated figure stands, arms hanging.  Although working from a definitive photographic source image, Doig layers his painting with multiple references from popular culture to literature an art history. The translucent sense of light and handling of paint recalls the plein air painting of Claude Monet, and Doig himself concedes the importance of his Impressionist forefather in the creation of the snow scenes in particular: "When I was making the 'snow' paintings I was looking at Monet, where there is the incredibly extreme, apparently exaggerated use of colour." (the artist cited in: Adrian Searle, Kitty Scott and Catherine Grenier, Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 132).   

Doig has often referred to his paintings as 'flashbacks' – a cinematic terms that is played out in the present work by the featureless silhouetted figure and its  ethereal, nostalgic environment where the mellifluous forms and delicate colours of a frozen landscape seem to merge into each other.  Simultaneously figurative and abstract, White Out occupies an alternate reality in which photographic memory meets creative dream. The effect is one of eerie tranquillity – of a snowy idyll frozen under the bewitching spell of the artist's brush.  Evading any set locality of place or time, the frosted serenity of the wooded landscape is tinged with an ominous sense of the unknown emanating from the shimmering beauty of its palette. Inhabiting the fertile ground between memory and imagination, White Out offers a profound examination into painting's innumerable possibilities, in a world saturated with photographic images.