Whizzing Past
February 21st, 2009Peter Doig at Gavin Brown’s kept me rapt in the gallery for over an hour. I had to go home for a nap afterward.
The paintings are nocturnes telling of otherworldly landscape, Trinidad, where labor is scarce and leisure abundant. Maracas features a ziggurat of improbably giant speakers. The figure perched at one corner goes blurry and formless, as if the thundering bass is vibrating him to vapor. In House of Flowers, a diaphanous bubble man seems to materialize from a windblown stream of fluttering cherry blossoms and/or bubbles. Throughout his scumbled torso, splendid highlights mirror the neighboring fields of pink and yellow. The bubble man is reflective in surface, and based on the body language, reflective in mental state. The hallucinatory image vibes with the trippy, foggy quality of Doig’s landscapes, and let’s remember that one of Doig’s earlier works shows a figure tripping out on the ice beneath him. That work’s title is Blotter. Incidentally, House of Flowers is also the title of a Truman Capote musical that introduced Americans to the steel drum, an instrument indigenous to Trinidad.
In Untitled (Ping Pong), a pot-bellied, mustached, balding man swings a paddle, not connecting with the white ball that whizzes by and crosses in front of his chest. The man’s opponent does not appear, but balls don’t hit themselves, so we can surmise his presence via the ball, just as we can see wind by the motion of leaves on trees. The ball is the surrogate of the “other” player. (In an adjacent room, preliminary watercolors reveal the partner to be a woman; she is primitively rendered as a long-haired Gumby with gravity-defying breasts.)
I love this painting because the distorted space juggles perspectives and flirts with aligned edges; I just have to geek out over the games Doig plays. (You shouldn’t watch.)
First, we can agree that the pictorial eye level is the top of the table. The table surface does not diminish, but rather levels out, compacting the table top to a flat white strip. That strip echoes the matrix of strips behind it. Green paint clears its throat and reminds us of its presence by dripping into the strip of white. And just above that be-dripped white strip, the grid shares its single row of uniform, black units. Tic tac toe.
(In real life, my camera does this annoying thing where it seeks out and focuses on the hardest edges and starkest contrast, at the expense of the actual subject, such as a friends face. This painting must use the same camera, because the hard-edged grid of black, blues, and gray seems most in focus, while the trees behind and the game in front seem blurred.)
-So we know where eye level is, but we don’t know where to stand. We can’t see where the table legs meet the ground. We can’t see the ground at all, so we have no idea where and how that strange grid wall has materialized. (What is that, anyway? It reminds me of something…) Doig has hidden these important clues in the flat, shimmering field of bright green that seems to creep onto the canvas like mold, at least as much as it renders tall grass. Consequently, it’s unclear whether this is one-point perspective or two-point.
The table legs are unequally spaced apart. The left-side legs are closer together than the right-side legs are together. Our point of view is from the left of the canvas. And the way the net dodges the exact middle of the grid wall makes the scene dynamic. We are in motion, tracking the movement of the ball, at this frozen instant when one player is losing the match (again, a photographic phenomenon). We don’t know if the man is winning because the woman hit the ball too far, or if the woman is winning because the man missed the ball. Either way, we see it Happening Now.
In one-point perspective, the table legs at each end of the table would appear closer to their mates. In two-point, we would see more of the net stretching across the table. Yet we don’t see that, because the net does not diminish.
Because eye level is at the table surface, we are looking up at the pong player. His torso is foreshortened; we know that if he were standing upright, the distance from chin to waist would be much greater. He is stooped over, and given the perspective, he is nearly diving.
So Doig is messing with our depth perception. Is he trying to simulate what happens when I lose at ping-pong (or basketball, or billiards? That depth perception has failed? He is confusing me in order to transmit the players’ confusion.
Hey, you show an analytic painting; you get an analytic reading.