Video: No Foreign Lands: A Caribbean Odyssey by Peter Doig
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
A hazy horizon blending smoothly with the blurred outlines of a sleepy sea, leaves as ripe and juicy as tropical fruits are mystical landscapes that shape the picturesque reality of the artist and traveler Peter Doig. His new exhibition, No Foreign Lands, explores life in the Caribbean through an avalanche of vibrant colors and textures, evoking tropical visions that live on the borderline between memory and imagination.
Peter Doig is a British artist working in the mainstream of magical realism. He is considered one of the key figures in the figurative painting renaissance, which began in the mid-90s and continues to this day.
Doig's parents left their hometown in Scotland when he was still a child. The family moved to the tropical island of Trinidad in the southern Caribbean. Peter traveled a lot, lived in Canada, studied at St. Martin's and Chelsea in London, but eventually returned to Trinidad again. But even before his move, Caribbean motives invariably seeped into his paintings.
“I remembered architecture, I could revive smells in my memory, I remembered roads and paths,” says Doig in an interview. “This place has a rich visual potential that has a powerful impact on you even in your earliest years. I realized that I had always loved him, felt a sense of belonging, even though I had not returned there for thirty-three years."
Doig skillfully juggles the traditions of the great color painters of the past, adjusting their aesthetics to the needs of contemporary painting. Paul Gauguin's acid stains surround the skeletal trees, as if descended from the canvases of Maurice Denis, while the ghostly figures in the style of Édouard Vuillard wander through the space of the canvas.
Doig creates a timeless reality, generously endowing it with the classic beauty that art history has formulated for centuries, and sprinkling with the luminescent motifs of the digital age, to edify skeptics who argue that figurative painting is dead.
Doig's paintings look like memories of an exotic journey, which over time become overgrown with mythical details, and turn into a fantasy story based on real events, where it is no longer possible to distinguish truth from fiction, and there is no point in trying.
The vibrant, challenging visual culture of tropical countries has always made an indelible impression on European artists who have had a chance to get to know her personally. Perhaps the most famous example of an irrepressible craving for southern exoticism in the history of painting is Paul Gauguin. But sometimes the opposite happens. The works of the Brazilian photographer Rafael D'Alo show what happens if an artist who grew up in a warm and sunny country is seriously interested in the aesthetics of Dutch and Flemish painting of the 16th - 18th centuries.
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