.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘I’m not a life painter. The silhouette is more and more important to me so I often cut out figures from postcards or photographs. I think if the silhouette is right, the painting is going in the right direction. If the figures are awkward in a wrong way, it’s unconvincing, but if they are awkward in an interesting way, it somehow works.’
–Peter Doig
Executed in 2011, Peter Doig’s Untitled, Ping Pong Player offers a characteristically fantastical and dreamlike vision of a figure engaged in a one-sided game of table tennis. The player’s opponent is nowhere to be seen, and indeed the protagonist himself is shrouded in elusive mystery: entirely silhouetted, he remains intangibly anonymous. The work is aglow in a mist of blues and greens, which seem to meld and clash against each other. A tiled wall of multi-toned blue forms the backdrop of the work, and a fringe of spritely foliage spills wildly over its upper edge. The resplendent turquoise floor is more suggestive of translucent pools of swirling water than concrete grounding. Indeed, the shadowy subject of the work has been curiously depicted without any legs, and indeed his upper torso appears to dissipate into incorporeal nothingness. He seems to float within the surrealistic space, like a hallucinatory and half-remembered version of reality. Speaking of his enigmatic portrayals of the human form, Doig has commented, ‘I’m not a life painter. The silhouette is more and more important to me so I often cut out figures from postcards or photographs. I think if the silhouette is right, the painting is going in the right direction. If the figures are awkward in a wrong way, it’s unconvincing, but if they are awkward in an interesting way, it somehow works’ (P. Doig, quoted in S. O’Hagan, ‘Peter Doig: the art of the foreign,’ The Guardian, July 2013). This work presents a reworking of Doig’s earlier painting, Ping Pong from 2006- 08, in which the same figure appears in a similar stance. This earlier rendition of this work explores a more solid, structured and geometric composition. In Untitled, Ping Pong Player, the depiction has become dreamy: the watercoloured legs of the Ping-Pong table appear to drip and melt off the page, evoking a distant, hazy and ethereal memory of a painted past.
–Peter Doig
Executed in 2011, Peter Doig’s Untitled, Ping Pong Player offers a characteristically fantastical and dreamlike vision of a figure engaged in a one-sided game of table tennis. The player’s opponent is nowhere to be seen, and indeed the protagonist himself is shrouded in elusive mystery: entirely silhouetted, he remains intangibly anonymous. The work is aglow in a mist of blues and greens, which seem to meld and clash against each other. A tiled wall of multi-toned blue forms the backdrop of the work, and a fringe of spritely foliage spills wildly over its upper edge. The resplendent turquoise floor is more suggestive of translucent pools of swirling water than concrete grounding. Indeed, the shadowy subject of the work has been curiously depicted without any legs, and indeed his upper torso appears to dissipate into incorporeal nothingness. He seems to float within the surrealistic space, like a hallucinatory and half-remembered version of reality. Speaking of his enigmatic portrayals of the human form, Doig has commented, ‘I’m not a life painter. The silhouette is more and more important to me so I often cut out figures from postcards or photographs. I think if the silhouette is right, the painting is going in the right direction. If the figures are awkward in a wrong way, it’s unconvincing, but if they are awkward in an interesting way, it somehow works’ (P. Doig, quoted in S. O’Hagan, ‘Peter Doig: the art of the foreign,’ The Guardian, July 2013). This work presents a reworking of Doig’s earlier painting, Ping Pong from 2006- 08, in which the same figure appears in a similar stance. This earlier rendition of this work explores a more solid, structured and geometric composition. In Untitled, Ping Pong Player, the depiction has become dreamy: the watercoloured legs of the Ping-Pong table appear to drip and melt off the page, evoking a distant, hazy and ethereal memory of a painted past.