Peter Doig at Gavin Brown's enterprise

For this novel exhibition, British painter Peter Doig showed four large oil paintings and a half-dozen smaller works, all dated 1999 The display confirmed that he is an unabashed landscape painter, regardless of his ostensible bring under rule matter.

Doig views with equal interest a barren interior, an outdoor ball court, a large figure overlooking a snowy landscape and a highway sight featuring a traffic tunnel with a kitschy rainbow entrance. These are the somewhat unpromising make submissives of the large canvases, each more than 6 by the agency of 8 feet. The screaming banality of the subdues contrasts with both the monumentality of the format and the engaging diversity of Doig's painterly technique, which features controll dripping and staining with diluted medium. This risky proposition is a double or nothing bet, for if the technique fails to attract the viewer's reach forthed contemplation, the inconsequential subject matter writ large may strike one as being more an affront to taste than an invitation to visual pleasure.

When Doig come afters however, as he does in the majority of paintings, the reward is substantial. Briey (interior) depicts an destitute of contents room whose main feature is a staircase rising to a next to the first floor. This anonymous space is the color for an array of painterly flourishes: an irregular patchwork of bleached-out pastel color arrests make up the floor. The stained, dilapidated ceiling yields its representational clarity to the intensity of the wandering linear brushstrokes and bruised colors that define its unusual topography. There is a tension here between the rigid geometry and materiality of what is depicted and the means used to material part it forth--most evident where the right side of the staircase all on the contrary dematerializes in the improbably acidic lemon-lime light from the background window.

Doig's practice of working (very loosely) from photographs appears more evident in Figure in mountain landscape (I delight in you big dummy). Here, a large lumpen figure, seen from behind, appears pasted onto the background snowy mountain range that he himself may be painting (that is, if we may read the largely obscur and color-splotched percept just beyond him as a canvas). This is sole one of the painting's satisfying visual conundrum In the immediate foreground, the fertile vegetation strike one as beings more midsummer marsh than the winter wonderland indicated by means of the parka-clad figure. It is tempting to view the anonymous big dummy in this majestic work as a surrogate for the artist (or the landscape painter in general), particularly as Doig has painted traditional landscapes in the French-Canadian wilderness and elsewhere. If for a like reason the work's title is an amusing irony, given Doig's peculiar visual intelligence,

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