“The white flowers have the fury of battle, they lay siege to the mountains… angry and Alpine, their petals blur into a white gust from the Matterhorn or the streets of Zermatt.”
—Derek Walcott, The Prodigal: 12
Inspired by Derek Walcott’s series of poems The Prodigal, Peter Doig’s Zermatt series portrays six diverse visual narratives from the artist’s experiences in the picturesque Swiss skiing resort. Doig painted the series between 2020 and 2021, shortly after his stay at architect and artist Heinz Julen’s chalet in Zermatt during the winter season. Completed later from memory to recall the snowscapes of Zermatt, the present series draws upon a variety of influences – from the idyllic village and its longstanding religious traditions to the dramatic alpine landscape and the falling snow, reminiscent of the gust of petals described in Walcott’s poem.
The giclée print edition, realised in 2022, is a large-scale homage to the poster-inspired paintings. Doig drew compositional and conceptual inspiration from vintage ski posters depicting dynamic skiers surrounded by imposing, snow-covered mountains, which aimed to allure individuals to the mountains. Through expressive use of colour and references to such posters, Zermatt manifests the artists exploration of the slippage between memory, reality, and imagination. For instance, the scattered snowflakes in Road to Zermatt stand as a metaphor for the brokenness of memories, while the light-green tint of Couloir 2 evokes yellow-tinted ski goggles. The resulting blur between representation and reinterpretation, memories both real and imagined, has come to guide Doig’s formal concerns, reinforcing the often foggy, inarticulate sensation of remembering. Emblematic of Doig’s artistic endeavours both conceptually and visually, Zermatt is a remarkable example of Doig’s extensive body of work, confirming his rank as one of the most renowned figurative painters of his generation.
