09 Nov 2012

Peter Doig: Imaginary Places at the MAC, Belfast

Imaginary Places brings together a number of significant works by Peter Doig from the early and mid-1990's, a period which was critical in positioning Doig as a major international artist.

In these early works Peter Doig's subjects are often sourced from film stills and photographs, he records places at the fringes of normality, anonymous locations where the urban and natural worlds meet.

Doig's paintings disorientate us, even when they depict recognisable imagery such as figures and buildings. We are often plunged into an unreliable world of reflections, sometimes literally when we are presented with the icy lakes and watery depths that feature in paintings such as, Window Pane, 1993, but more often in a metaphorical sense - the mirror image of memory or fantasy.

While Doig's paintings might lead us to biographical, literary or filmic detail, elements of theatre, or the art of the past - all of which may play a part in their development - they are however ultimately to do with the placement of pigment on canvas and the ways in which, through a variety of processes, the painted image attains a specific resonance, a condition that is beyond words. His rigorous approach to surface, texture and colour puts him among the most inventive painters of his generation, leaving a profound influence on young artists and contemporaries alike.