Letter to fallen idols, or that imperious look
Peter Doig is one of the best painters. I need to write him another letter and will soon. His is the type of making that pulls and pushes at discovery, where the thing that is discovered does not so much map onto the thing made as to exist adjacent to it, but not in its shadow. Of the world but not in it. Dreams and floaters and the shimmering pointillism of cluster headaches and migraines with aura. All types of aura with the Doig paintings.
His work makes figuration endlessly interesting to me - the way a work that is recognizably based on some model (whether a photo or a mnemonic image) can have clarity in the sign-signifier way of correspondence and still vibrate with alternative meanings and slippage.
