British artist Peter Doig

Blotter, a painting by British artist Peter Doig, depicts a young man standing in what at first seems to be a puddle, but which on closer inspection is actually a thin film of water covering a sheet of ice, the edge of a frozen pond. The water and ice perform a double refraction, slivering the figure's reflection into overlapping circles of colour, dispersing this trace across the water's silvery face. Doig's paint handling is incredibly loose and confident; forms are painted with contour lines and filled with roughly brushed patches of color -- a technique that suggests a Gustav Klimt composition reworked by David Milne.

The work's title, Blotter, refers to the way that the frozen surface of the water bears an abstracted trace or blotted image of the world above it, and to the illicit chemical that might provide a similarly hallucinatory experience. The deliberate ambiguity of the title is significant. An acid trip is private and internalized, whereas painting opens such subjective experience to shared, collective reception.

Doig's paintings function similarly, holding up a distorting mirror to a world of images drawn freely and improbably from Art Deco, regionalist modernism, architectural photography, home snapshots, cheesy horror films like Friday the 13th, psychedelic concert posters and the decorative, gestural abstraction of figures like Pat Stier and Joan Mitchell. The content of individual Doig images is less important than their painted treatment; his technique suggests that all looking is contaminated by subliminal traces of visual culture, high and low. Culture is a precondition of being able to recognize landscape as a distinct category in the first place.

Acknowledging that the contemporary image world is a consequence of photography's sly insinuation into every category of human experience, Doing does not attempt to hide his photographic sources, but rather makes them visible as photographs within the body of the paint. In works like Cabin Lake and Concrete Cabin, this strategy takes the form of a grey pattern of dots visible behind virtuoso spatters and stains, passages of seamless stylistic quotation, ranging from looming Tom Thompson trees to the green blur of a Fairfield Porter landscape.

Not all Doig's works are consistently successful. His least ambitious paintings lean too heavily on their photographic sources or on diagrammatic readings of the paintings' content. In particular, views of the interior and exterior of a Le Courbusier apartment block seem particularly sterile. In these thematically didactic paintings, Doig's stylistic alterations come across like window dressing on top of images copied too faithfully from pre-existing photographic sources. Other images, like Blotter, Cabin Lake, and Ski Jacket, are far looser in their combination of photographic and painterly details, and consequently far more successful.