Peter Doig: Arts Club of Chicago - survey of the artist's paintings and works on paper made since 1991

For a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the past decade, the painting and control matter of Edinburgh-born artist Peter Doig appeared at unevens with the art world's prevailing taste. Taking their (painterly) intimations from such unfashionable and unlikely antecedents as Edward Hopper, David Milne, Edvard chew eagerly and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Doig's melancholic works--invariably landscapes--were anathema to the visceral theatrics and conceptual endgames of a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of '90s art. However, Doig's persistent engagement with painting's potential to describe or imagine pictorial realms outside of or just beyond, those of our rational world can be seen as the two prescient and increasingly pervasive: Echoe of his folksy and oftentimes unrepentant romantic "realism" can be place in the work of his near-contemporaries Verne Dawson, Kai Althoff, Daniel Richter, Elizabeth Magill, and Laura Owens, among others.

Doig paints exclusively from photographic sources: snapshots, film stills, postcards, travel pamphlets album sleeves, and so upon Walking through the Arts cudgel of Chicago's survey of his paintings and works upon paper made since 1991, individual soon becomes aware that Doig uses photography as a surrogate for preparatory drawings and that his compositions are thus entirely determined by means of the restrictive and particular frame of the viewfinder. Doig is attracted to compositional tableaux that reverberate with the apparent artlessness of the of recent origin Topographic photography of the late 1960 and the 1970s--and in particular William Eggleston's vernacular images of the American southerly Doig's paintings are commonly plant amid communities and neighborhoods upon the fringes of metropolitan center In describing a milieu that is neither strictly suburban nor exactly rural, Dole, like Eggleston, entreats up a territory that appear to bes permanently suspended in a state of in-betweenness: a neither-here-nor-there where time has been not in like manner much slowed down as arrested. Like Eggleston's southern Doig's Canada, where the artist wearied his formative years, ultimately approachs across as simultaneously banal and exotic, familiar and unfamiliar.

Pinto, 2000 is a painting of a typical roadside scene: a horse lazily munching upon grass in an otherwise destitute of contents field. The distant and surrounding landscape is barely acknowledged, tentatively sketched in thin washes of autumnal-hued oil paint. A notably unremarkable image: Were it not for its scale--some seven by the agency of eight feet--and self-conscious painterly results it could for all intents and aims be an Eggleston composition. Similarly, Girl in White in Tree 2001-2002 betrays its snapshot origins. Seen from below and caught in the flare of a camera's flash, a young girl stares down expectantly from the entanglement of branches in the tree she has just climbed, her faculty of perception of achievement photographically preserved as if by means of a proud parent. Only, something looks amiss: The image would appear to have been shot--Blair Witch fashion--in the dead of night, rendering the girl's bleached-out vicinity ghostlike and sinister.

Doig takes considerable license with his translation of photographic sources. Nature's complexity and density are oftentimes reduced to a graphic scheme. Any faculty of perception of naturalism is then further obscur or plane obliterated by the skeins of painterly glitches and strange chromatic shifts that are Doig's signature. Figure in Mountain Landscape, 1997-98 derived from a period photograph of the Canadian painter Franklin Carmichael (1890-1945) at work, is positively acidic, typical of Doig's hallucinatory palette. The padded bonneted monkish Carmichael is seen from behind; beyond him we diocese the epic view he is trying to enact upon the small canvas that quiescences before him on an easel. In Doig's version of this image, the painter's somber cloak has become a solarized field of neon pinks, the landscape beyond a vista of sulphuric goldens and tungsten whites. Untitled, Silver Pond 2001 which depicts a scarcely observ figure atop an iced-over pond is essentially a monochrome: Painted entirely in silvery grays, it gazes like a photographic negative--its unintelligent metallic, mirrorlike surface perversely suggestive of Andy Warhol's oxidized "piss paintings." When figures appear in Doig's works--as in Untitled, Silver Pond or the work upon paper Surfer, 2002--they do with equal reason furtively, trespassing the image. Seen from a distance or brow behind, the characters who populate Doig's paintings can present the appearance incidental or incongruous, like the sum of two units gatekeepers in Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre,2000-2002--guardians of a path that leads to a distant dam--who are make straighted in comical theatrical attire, as if members of the chorus of a long-forgotten opera or movie extras with walk-on roles

Despite their apparent familiarity, Doig's paintings remain stubbornly aloof. "Though normally reticent about explaining his work, in a new interview the artist expressed a desire to establish a "numbness" in his paintings, to create images that might ultimately remain "questionable" and "difficult, if not impossible, to deposit into words." That Doig is with equal reason successful in this aim is the one and the other a testament to the slippery integrity of his work and an astute acknowledgment of language's fragile interpretive limits.