PETER DOIG | By a River

Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York
Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above in 2003)
Sotheby's, London, 16 October 2010, Lot 229
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Hanover, Kestner Gesellschaft; and Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne, Peter Doig - Metropolitain, May - September 2004, n.p., no. 27, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is much lighter and brighter and the greens in the top left hand corner are more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals some very faint wear to the extreme top left hand corner and some tiny specks of media towards the lower left corner. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Ethereal, oneiric and replete with biblical suggestion, By a River is a masterclass in expression and storytelling by the artist many critics see as the leader of the contemporary resurgence of interest in figurative painting. Composed by Peter Doig in 2003, the work is one of a series of filmic paintings, beginning with the haunting Music of the Future (2002-07), that depict a mysterious, blue-robed man seated by a section of water. Serving as the dramatic pivot of the image, the bearded figure raises a plethora of questions as mysterious and nebulous as the otherworldly water by which he sits: the viewer is made to wonder who this man is, where he is from, and the ultimate purpose of his waiting there. A personified teardrop, the figure sits on what in turn appears to be gaseous, cloud-like steps on a moss-green hillside, or rungs of a stone ladder suspended in a psychotropic skyscape. Like a purgatorial hinterland reminiscent of the landscapes of Edvard Munch, the setting at once recalls images from art history, such as John the Baptist in Geertgen tot Sint Jans’s painting St John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1490-95), and conjures a realm devoid of specific spatiotemporal reference-points. While the present work’s title is consistent with the former reading (St John, after all, baptised Christ in the River Jordan) the ‘river’ itself is an unfathomable black tinged with an alchemical yellow froth. We might think of the Lethe – the river of forgetting and unmindfulness in Hades’ underworld – and interpret this greenish, disorienting world in which the figure sits as a kind of collage of temporal perspectives: past looking forward on future looking back, superimposed on an irreducibly emotional present. Doig’s rejuvenation of painting can in part be attributed to his immensely eclectic range of influences from a vast array of media. Fascinated by the slippages and mediations of memory, Doig was heavily influenced by the post-Impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard, who famously worked from memory alone. Doig describes what Bonnard crystallises in his painting as “the space that is behind the eyes. It’s as if you were lying in bed trying hard to remember what something looked like. And Bonnard managed to paint that strange state. It is not a photographic space at all. It is a memory space, but one which is based on reality” (Peter Doig in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, in: Adrian Searle, Ed., Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 142). While Doig’s paintings exemplify the earnest formal rigour of Abstract Expressionism and the psychedelic mastery of colour in landscape shown by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Doig drew just as much from techniques in filmmaking. Indeed the sequence of works depicting the blue-robed figure appear to transmute into painting a gradual focusing in on a character initially only barely visible in a wide-angled shot. Like a Lynchian dream sequence or Werner Herzog panoramic, many of Doig’s figurations – such as the present work and 100 Years Ago (2002) – provide both intra- and inter-work intrigue that weaves its way into our unconscious.

Born in Scotland but raised in Trinidad and Canada, Doig settled in Trinidad in 2002. Identifying as an outsider in all of Trinidad, Scotland, Canada and England, Doig is both sensitive to the gaze of the outsider, and suspicious of the exoticising tendency of the West towards the Caribbean islands. His artistic sensibility coruscates on his figurative paintings, providing a radical, refreshing response to the cooly impassive neo-conceptual work of his postmodern predecessors. Across the entirety of By a River, Doig melds abstract and figurative modes of depiction and blends personal memory with art-historical reference to create a painting that is as beguiling as it is beautiful.