PETER DOIG | Border Country

Victoria Miro Gallery, London Private Collection, Mexico

Private Collection (acquired from the above)

Christie’s, London, 23 October 2005, Lot 156 (consigned by the above)

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although there are stronger yellow tones and the blue is paler in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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“People often say that my paintings remind them of particular scenes from films or certain passages from books, but I think it’s a different thing altogether. There is something more primal about painting... They are totally non-linguistic... I am trying to create something that is questionable, something that is difficult, if not impossible, to put into words.” Peter Doig cited in: Adrian Searle et al., Peter Doig, New York 2007, p. 124.

Border Country is an engaging work that neatly encapsulates Peter Doig’s distinct painterly mood. It is deeply suffused with a sense of nostalgia and memory, overtly concerned with themes of transience and travel, and employs a number of this artist’s idiosyncratic painterly devices. This work marks an interesting stylistic turning point within Doig’s oeuvre. At this time, his works began to possess an aqueous clarity and delicately diffuse quality that seems quite different to the densely painted layers that defined his Canadian winter-landscapes of the early 1990s. In this regard, and particularly apparent in the car-interior details and windshield viewpoint, the present work is vividly reminiscent of Doig’s Country Rock series, created in the same year. There are three major works in this important series: one achieved an auction record for the artist at Sotheby’s in June 2014, another was illustrated on the cover of the catalogue for Doig’s retrospective at Tate Modern, and another is held in the collection of the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev, Ukraine.

A sense of geographic transience is integral to Doig’s artistry. Born in Scotland, he spent his early childhood in Trinidad and his adolescence in Canada. After graduating from art school, namely Wimbledon, St Martins, and Chelsea respectively, Doig remained in London until 2002 when he moved to Trinidad. The relentlessness of this peripatetic lifestyle is reflected in his art. His works are not the touristic highlights and remembered landmarks of a life spent in transit. They detail the places between the places; the half-forgotten moments of travel that are known to all but vividly remembered by none. Doig’s images of the past are viewed through the veils of the present; each scene is suffused with an almost dreamlike sense of nostalgia, and characterised by a hazy atmosphere that perfectly summates the inaccuracy of partially recalled memory. The present work typifies this mood; we are presented with a single snapshot from an extended car journey. We can’t infer where the car is going and are given no clues as to where it has come from; we are shown only a white house, glimpsed as a tiny speck in the rear view mirror. This painting’s title – Border Country – only adds to this sense of total transience.

Doig’s practice is perennially reliant on source material. While the narrative and emotive emphases of his works are often personal, their visual forms are based upon photographs, film stills, art-historical referents, or even vintage postcards. The present work seems particularly cinematic. In subject, it is wholly redolent of the great American road trip that has been so often documented on the silver screen. Meanwhile, in construction, its multiple viewpoints and various points of recession through windscreen, rear view, and wing mirror recall the work of Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. Doig has spoken in interview about his emulation of Ozu’s work, particularly with regard to the care with which he constructs each tableau, and the “measured stillness” that movies like Tokyo Story convey (Peter Doig cited in: Calvin Tomkins, ‘The Mythical Stories in Peter Doig’s Paintings, The New Yorker, 11 December 2017, online). It was a similar mood of stillness and echoing silence that Doig found so appealing in the work of Edward Hopper, and indeed Hopper’s influence upon Border Country is overt; in the bright diffuse atmosphere, as well as in the eerie figureless landscape.

Peter Doig’s best paintings have a timeless feel; a sense of intangibility that renders them impossible to comprehend or classify. They are stills from a cinematic plot to which we have no access, jarring moments of dissonant déjà vu in a place we have never been before; they are the fading passages of a dream, rapidly losing context as we slip back into consciousness. In this regard, Border Country is an idiosyncratic example of Doig’s celebrated painterly style. It is a significant painting from an important stylistic moment in the artist’s career that melds influences from painting and film into an uncanny work of striking impact.