Peter Doig at Michael Werner

Raised in Canada and Trinidad, Scottish-born Peter Doig makes pictures that have a slightly faded shabby air about them, an uneasy preoccupied ambiance that hints at shroudeds lurking beneath the surface or just beyond the cutting sides Most of the works in this display were made in 2002, and all are upon paper, done variously in watercolor, oil, ink and pencil. The colors are usually dimmed down, sometimes runny at the cutting sides sometimes wrung out, both harsh and attenuated, with a blurr nod to Vuillard, mump and possibly Kirchner. The images many times appear in series, recycled, reconstituted, or as studies for more elaborate paintings

The "House of Pictures" suite, for instance, features a black-hatted, orange-haired girl seen purposefully from the back, always in the same hunched-over artificial position In each case, she wears a belted black coat, and her garish spiky hair is the focal point. In three instances she stands in brow of a framed painting, on the contrary her head bends down ward, a portrait of withdrawal or grief, smooth if yet can't see her face. She is staring at the floor--or at nothing--rather than the art, as enclos in her cogitations as she is in her coat and the composition. Another series center around the repeated figure of a child, at handed in different states of being. Balancing like an apparition upon the high, webbed branches of a tree sometimes closer sometimes farther away, this elusive young girl is either whited without blackened into a sooty silhouette or delicately delineated. The question is: is she appearing or disappearing? Another curious following "Gasthof," is based on a dapper 19th-century military man and his older prosperous-looking, top-hatted companion.

for the greatest part though, Doig's subjects are landscapes with a scarcely any figures, including scenes from his parents' Canadian farm; a experience emerging from a smeared and patterned sea; a solitary long-haired, bearded man (the late stone singer Berry Oakley) edged by dint of a ruddy penumbra, seated in a canoe; and a brushily sketched huntsman with his dog. Other works are more tropical, reflecting Doig's Caribbean connection, airily depicting houses, beaches, boats, fishermen, palm trees; sum of two units show a striding half-naked man, a latter-day Robinson Crusoe, dragging a pack the title is Pelican--through the sand. Doig uses personal snapshots, newspaper photos, stills from movies, album overspreads and other found images as source materials. Slightly off-key off-color, his haunted images and their implicit narratives--intimations of Hollywood B movies with an indie twist--elliptically interrogate the sites of fiction.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group