“I am always interested in what we miss when we try to focus on what we see.”
A matchless example of Peter Doig’s atmospheric oeuvre, Bomb Island conjures up a transient place both recognisable and unknown, remembered and half-forgotten, where memory and imagination are one. Displaying some of the artist’s most admired iconographic idiosyncrasies, the present painting exudes the nostalgic and ethereal quality of something that can only be articulated in part, caught in between recognition and disaffection, but shrouded in a distinctive sense of tranquil mystery. In Bomb Island, Doig creates a dislocated and atemporal emotional topography informed by imagery from a National Geographic issue depicting the desolate Suakin Island on the Red Sea coast. Suakin is one of the oldest seaports on the coast of Africa with a rich history of trade spanning over 1,000 years. The now-abandoned and disintegrating island of ruins has become the subject of fantastical local folklore, and today the port provides key access between continents for thousands of pilgrims completing the Haj every year. A test.mes nt to Doig’s mastery of image-making and his inclination to draw upon a wide range of visual source material, Bomb Island creates an absorptive liminal space at the threshold of past and present, figuration and abstraction.
Whitechapel Artist Award: Peter Doig,
Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, August - September 1991
Bomb Island stands amidst only a handful of Doig’s most significant early works, marking the emergence of a young master. The work dates from a seminal moment in the artist’s career, when shortly after graduating from Chelsea College of Art, Doig was awarded the prestigious Whitechapel Artist’s Prize, which resulted in a ground-breaking exhibition in 1991 and a Turner prize nomination in 1994. Doig devised Bomb Island as the leading centrepiece of his pivotal Whitechapel exhibition, where the work stood alongside other notable and much-acclaimed major works from this specific moment in Doig’s career: herein, Bomb Island, and its sister pieces Rosedale, The House that Jacques Built and Iron Hill, thus provide a sharp contrast to the conceptual installations en vogue in London at the t.mes . In an unshakeable commitment to painting, Bomb Island was the centrepiece of the pivotal Whitechapel exhibition, and sits alongside other notable and much-acclaimed major works from this specific moment in Doig’s career: herein, Bomb Island, and its sister pieces Rosedale, The House that Jacques Built and Iron Hill, thus provide a sharp contrast to the conceptual installations en vogue in London at the t.mes . Fittingly, the work took centre stage again in Doig’s career-defining retrospective at Tate Britain in 2008.
Image: © Bridgeman Images
Bomb Island’s importance is further amplified by the uniqueness of its subject matter in the artist’s oeuvre, while simultaneously retaining the incomparable compositional candour and brooding palette that attests to Doig’s remarkable artistic abilities. Painted at the t.mes of the Persian Gulf War, when TV screens were inundated with images of bombed villages in desert landscapes, Doig’s Bomb Island conjures up a ghostly freeze frame of an abandoned island, showing an arid landscape surrounded by an expanse of dark, murky waters. Loosely based on aerial photography featured in National Geographic, the atmosphere is fraught with almost cinematic disquiet, while a concrete narrative remains indefinite and illusive. The looming presence of the ravaged island invites comparison with Arnold Böcklin’s ominous Symbolist masterpiece Die Toteninsel. The architectural detail on the other hand recalls the consummate, imaginary Weltlandschaft (world landscape) of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Tower of Babel, achieved by relying merely on memory and engravings to meticulously render the intricate, panoramic detail of the densely populated biblical landscape encompassing mountains, lowlands, water, and late medieval buildings. Isolated signs of human presence – boats, domestic structures and industrial buildings – are scattered across Doig’s elusive scene and suggest habitation, yet man is absent. The artist is interested in the “peripheral or marginal sites, places where the urban world meets the natural world. Where the urban elements almost become, literally, abstract devices” (Peter Doig cited in: Adrian Searle, Peter Doig, London, 2007, p. 139).
Image: © Alex Smailes, courtesy Phaidon Press
Artwork: © Peter Doig. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2021
Persuasively capturing the surreal sensation of familiarity only a dream can evoke, Doig’s landscape then compels the viewer to question the state of the scene the artist presents. “There exists a tension,” Doig explains, “between the often generic representation of a pastoral scene and the investment in my own experiences of the landscape. All of the paintings have an element of autobiography in them, but I resist making the autobiographical readings overly specific” (Peter Doig cited in: Hilke Wagner, ‘The Fortunate Traveller’, in Peter Doig: Metropolitain, Cologne 2004, p. 12). Combining and conflating imagery from multiple personal, public and found sources is a core tenet of Doig’s practice, allowing the artist to draw extensively upon his own experiences of displacement. The resulting slippage between representation and reinterpretation, memories real and imagined, has come to dictate his formal concerns, with the handling of the medium of paint itself serving as a conceptual means to approximate the inarticulable sensation of remembering.
Peter Doig, Swamped, 1990
The Monsoon Art collects ion
Image/Artwork: © Peter Doig. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021
(right)
Peter Doig, Jetty, 1994
Private collects ion
Image: © Bridgeman Images
Artwork: © Peter Doig. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021
A new breed of painting, Doig mixes the figurative with recognisable tropes of abstract painting in a metaphysical enquiry that interrogates the way we as human beings perceive. A seamlessly woven and grid-like tapestry of white, snow-like dots foregrounds the materiality of the medium in a self-reflective comment on the practice of painting, generating a visual interference that delicately alters the viewers perception of the landscape, drawing them inwards. “That is the way the eye looks,” Doig points out, “you are constantly looking through things, seeing the foreground and the background at the same t.mes ” (Peter Doig cited in: Judith Nesbitt, ‘A Suitable Distance’, in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate Britain, Peter Doig, 2008, p. 11). A touchstone motif in Doig's practice, the artist plays with the unresolved tension between visibility and inaccessibility, obscuring and blurring the hierarchy of things seen. In Bomb Island, the white dotted lines are particularly reminiscent of the gritty static interference of TV broadcasts. Working his way across the otherworldly surface, the geometric grid of Pointillist dabs of white paint emphasises an uncanny sense of slippage:
“[Capturing] the space that is behind the eyes. It’s as if you were lying in bed trying hard to remember what something looked like. […] It is not a photographic space at all. It is a memory space, but one which is based on reality.”
In its flawless execution of abstract compositional principles and perfect command of figuration, this compelling reinterpretation of a fading dreamscape is paradigmatic of the oeuvre of this modern master of atmosphere. Manifestly presenting the world through the artist’s eyes, Bomb Island stands as a momentous crescendo in Doig's oeuvre.