Peter Doig

Untitled (Silver Pond Painting) is related to Peter Doig's highly acclaimed snow series, a group of works that immerses the viewer in a harmonious luminosity of white forests, lakes, and mountainous sceneries. Grounded in the tradition of winter landscapes, a theme first sustained in a programmatic manner by the French Impressionists, Untitled (Silver Pond Painting) is a contemporary rendition of the unique visual characteristics of snow and winter light.

As a physical and ephemeral element, snow has been typically represented as a backdrop to human activities. Differing from this use, Doig materializes snow. It is depicted as unadulterated subject matter and is empowered by a beautiful translucency that ultimately becomes the picture's protagonist. Given the absence of sharp chromatic contrasts, our awareness of any color variation is particularly amplified. To discern compositional elements that would otherwise be missed, our eyes scrutinize the picture plane for slight subtleties in tone only to be further immersed in the inescapable lightness of the atmosphere. Doig's compression of space is also achieved through the tangled web of snow-laden branches which often serves as a visual curtain in the foreground. In Untitled (Silver Pond Painting), this lattice of abstracted garlands has an astounding visual impact, meshing together foreground and background in a matrix through which the viewer peers.

The presence of a figure humanizes Doig's landscapes where trees and branches frame an interior scene void of narrative but suggestive of the German Romantic theme of mankind dwarfed by mighty nature. Doig's imagery is sourced from personal associations, photography, and his memories, whether factual or imagined. The juxtaposition of this multiplicity of sources results in numerous incongruous realities. There is never a single interpretation of his landscapes, but rather an array of intertwined possibilities.  A painter's painter, Doig personifies a long lost Romanticism filled with expressiveness while remaining refreshingly unconcerned with abstraction or mimesis.