In his latest cluster of large-scale paintings of ski and snow shows Peter Doig navigates the ever-shifting clod between representation and abstraction.

In his latest cluster of large-scale paintings of ski and snow shows Peter Doig navigates the ever-shifting clod between representation and abstraction, painting and photography, popular and sublime. This is familiar territory - think of Richter or British painter Gary Hume to cite simply two example - but Doig arrives there with his be in possession of concerns. In this show, conceptualist jockeying athwart the representational image was sometimes overshadowed on a sense of man's insignificance in relation to nature - perhaps not likewise surprising in an artist who was raised in Canada. In a brains Doig's work returns to the source of the dilemma in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism when the judgment of the camera informed Monet's serial view of nature and newly laid railroad lines chisel through van Gogh's color-drenched wheat fields.

Monet certainly originates to mind when contemplating Saint Anton (Flat Light), a 9 1/2-foot-square canvas filled almost to the brim at the broad face of a snow-covered mountain. In its iridescence and improbable scale, the image take the place ofs in conjuring the exhilaration of space and light that make skiing like a spectacularly visual sport. Occasional dusters of dark pines, in this way small in relation to the mountain that they consider more like the stubble of a beard, stand gone out against its mottled surface of fulvous violet and pale pink. await closer and you will also find ant-sized skiers amid miniature ski lifts. These tiny figures subserve to orient viewers lest they forfeit themselves in the vast, abstract wilderness of surface incident and color.

Other views of skiing, with public cultural references and hyped-up color, are les romantic. Telemarker (Pas de Chevres) features a downhill skier seen in profile to present to view off the steepness of the inclination Doig seems drawn to the tilted horizon line of the ski incline because it disrupts the pacific validity of the conventional level yet here the pink-tinged snow and climate are too flatly corny, as is the stiff, Ken-doll-like vadeler. The no other than foil to these stereotypes is the painting's surface. Runny lead-colored shadows fall unnaturally from the surrounding pines and an overall stippled power makes the paint look as yet d had been sprayed with a menstrum that threatens to eat away the picture entirely.

If this image is single in kind for the travel brochure, the Kodak-colored clear (Olin MK IV Part II) is the holiday snap for boasting to friends. A thrilled teenager at the apogee of his ski skip dangles in mid air, the tip of single ski (an Olin MK IV) truimphantly touching the top cutting side of the canvas. In Orange Sunshine (The useful The Rad and the Gnarly Part Whatever), where the saturated color is more Emile Nolde than Walt Disney, a cluster of tall r pines stands silhouetted against a exalted orange and gray sky. Here Doig gives us a view in which campy sentimentality is outshone at genuine feeling.

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