PETER DOIG: Early Works - Michael Werner Gallery.
The return of Peter Doig to Michael Werner Gallery brings with it a period of the painters life, that has not been shown in London, since the 1980's. The walls gleam with bold tones and images loaded with 80's Iconography as the work presents a completely unknown side to Doig's career. Cityscapes, strip clubs and Cowboys present a painter working through the rich resource of the 1980's. Over loaded at points, some of his paintings show a overwhelming focus on the Image as the focal point to his work. The works on paper show a stripped back imagery as he deals with the skeleton of his motifs, amalgamating on the canvas, they bring points of reference to the surface acting as a historical record of a bold and complexed point in both American and British Culture . They also offer personal imagery from a Student trip to Rome to a local Strip club all seen through the eyes of a young painter graduating from Saint Martins.
The painting style is drastically different and is composed mostly of mix-media: Spray paint, stencils and oils adding further to there stylistic referent. As a whole they offer something completely different and this is why the show succeeds. Many fellow visitors where pre-occupied with clarification that this was a Peter Doig show and most left pleasantly surprised. For me I feel that with all the success and failures the work has to offer, you can see the appetite of a painter thirsty for imagery. Working through the images, and the show, you can begin so see how he resolved compositional configurations bringing forward more organic perspectives, that give room to his painterly layering. Focusing his energy on a single image you begin to see the settling of a dynamic that makes Doig so successful.
Thursday, 17th April 2014
TAL R, Walk towards Hare Hill - Victoria Miro Mayfair.
Tal R - Walk towards Hare Hill is hidden behind the walled entrance of Victoria and Miro's new space in St George Street Mayfair. The documentation of the experience of painting three specific spots in a forest near to the artist summerhouse in NTal Rorthern Denmark. As the Press Release informs worked on the thirty-seven paintings over a prolonged period, questioning the ability for the romantic notion of the wanderer, and outdoor painter, to still exist and if so can it still function as a contemporary activity?
He achieves both. Sustaining the romantic notion of the task he took on and using it to engage a further mechanism of artistic production, each an independent system, that are to be found within the series of works to a varying degree.
The imagery he uses grants the paintings a nostalgia and romanticism from the very beginning. I think its almost impossible for a viewer of art or even art history to not be sucked into the inevitable charged beauty of a woodland scene and still not be dizzy with the visual gluttony of this painterly habitat. Even so, Tal R achieves a subverted display to said scene through soft pastel undertones and loaded bodies dispersing the excepted form and allowing a porous perspective to hang between a set of marks.
This formal assessment highlight a further interest in Tal R Walk towards Hare Hill as his handling personally of the image, taking in and sitting next to or beside causes a duration. This duration seems not to distance him but distance the image. Its far more interesting to view the images in the series as a duration: a period of time, Where the sense of cohabitation and that sense of living collects its mass, it becomes a "metaphor for process".
This duration not only provides the mechanics of the work but goes full circle and enriches the romanticism of the view. In doing so I think Tal R has created a little space that pulls at the beauty of the image while distancing it from its expected display. An expected feeling from an unexpected source liberating for a moment the pre-fix of history painting.
