Multiple works installed

One of the most accomplished painters of the last decade, Peter Doig introduces a new spirit into the genre of narrative painting, from which emanates a modest, quiet nostalgia. Despite their haunting beauty and magic realism, these works, rendered with unsettling perfection, echo an impossible stillness within their timeless tranquility. If Doig's paintings evoke any kind of romanticism, it is one spiked with thorns. The artist sees his works as idea-based, reconquering the intellectual space of painting. Their restrained compositions and incomplete execution resemble drawings and watercolors rather than traditional oil paintings. The artist has said: "I'm interested in paintings that haven't really been completed, that aren't filled in." Working from cinema stills, found photographs, or postcards, while referenc- ing art history, Doig layers his borrowed imagery in such a way that it asserts the primacy of the painting process-turning the world of the real and familiar into uncanny presences by cunningly combining figuration with abstraction, reality with artificiality: "I've never been interested in inventing my own figures. 2 I'd rather that they are grounded in a type of reality that we all know." Based on a scene from the horror movie Friday the 13th, the artist's best-known paint- ings feature a long-haired man in a canoe in the middle of a vast lake. The canoe has become a seminal image in Doig's works, and he considers his paintings as "movie scenes with the viewer acting as director." Doig currently lives and works in Trinidad, where he spent his childhood and returned to with his own family in 2002. A year later, Doig cofounded StudioFilmClub, a makeshift cinema on the outskirts of Port of Spain that reg- ularly screens Caribbean and foreign movies. Many of his recent paintings seem infused with a tropical, almost Gauguinesque flair, which, however, relates less to his Caribbean lifestyle than to an abstracted and appropriated idea of the tropics. In 1902, the French naval doctor, poet, archaeologist, and ethnologist Victor Segalen, who had traveled extensively to China, Tahiti, East Asia and Ethiopia, followed the traces of Paul Gauguin on the Marquesas islands where the painter died. Later he undertook a similar expedition to Ethiopia to retrace the poet Arthur Rimbaud's "second life. Segalen's sub jective archaeologies were published in Le Mercure de France in 1904 (Gauguin dans son dernier décor) and 1906 (Le double Rimbaud). Segalen is rarely mentioned in literary circles; most of his writings still remain untrans lated, including his papers on what he called "Exotism." In December of 1908, Segalen wrote in "On Exotism as an Aesthetic of Diversity": First of all, clear the ground. Throw overboard all misused and stale content of the word exotism. Strip it from all its flashy rags: the palm trees and the camels; the tropical helmet, the black skin and the yellow sun. Next, strip the word exotism of its purely tropical, purely geographical meaning. Exotism is given not only in space, but equally in relation to time. And very quickly come to define, formulate the sensation of Exotism: which in the end is only the notion of difference, the per ception of diversity, the knowledge that something is not oneself, 4 and the ability of exotism, which is the ability to conceive the Other. Exoticism became fashionable in art and literature during the first two decades of the twentieth century, a fascination that had been initiated by the great voyages in the sixteenth century along with the discoveries and color nization of Africa, Asia, and America. At the time of Segalen's writing, there was a flourishing colonial literature of exoticism and orientalism. His reflec tions and writings on Exotism, however, differed from the colonial infatuation with the exotic; rather than producing a discourse in which the Other would be the subject or object, he attempted to provide a place for the Other in himself. Like Segalen, Peter Doig embodies the exotic, the Other. Doig's paintings have as their subject the desire of the Other rather than the Other itself. By placing himself and his work into the Other, Doig finds his own trope of exoti- cism in the mediated image-world of cinema, art history, or tourism: "I tried to avoid painting Trinidad itself, because I didn't feel I knew enough about it. I was quite conscious of not wanting to take things and claim them as being my own subject. I felt like I hadn't been there long enough to have an under- standing. All those paintings are actually based on postcards of India."
Text written by Curator Klaus Ottmann for the exhibition catalog.