Let’s make the bread rolls: dissolve the yeast in the water, then add the flour little by little. Once the flour and water is evenly combined add the olive oil, salt and liquorice.
240g of water
15g of fresh yeast
450g of plain flour
18g of salt
75ml of extra virgin olive oil
15g of liquorice powder
Mix well and transfer the dough to a large bowl, cover with a kitchen towel and set aside to rise for 1-1½ hours in a warm place. Divide the dough into evenly sized balls, place on a baking tray and leave to rise once more. Preheat the oven to 170°C/gas mark 5.
Brush the the rolls with olive oil and bake for 18 minutes.
Meanwhile, prepare the mango ketchup. In a medium saucepan heat the olive oil and sweat the onions and garlic. Add all the other ingredients and simmer for 15-20 minutes. With a blender or hand mixer blitz the mixture until smooth, then pass through a fine sieve.
1 tsp extra virgin olive oil
1/4 onion, finely chopped
1 tsp fresh ginger, grated
1 mango, peeled and roughly chopped
90ml of orange juice
45ml of dry white wine
12ml of cider vinegar
12ml of lime juice
20g of cane sugar
1/2 garlic clove
1 tsp allspice
1 pinch of cayenne pepper
1 pinch of cinnamon
1 tsp ground cumin
Let’s make the Passito mayo: combine the egg yolk, a pinch of salt and a few drops of water in a small bowl. Slowly drizzle in the oil, whisking all the time, until emulsified. Mix in the Passito and season with more salt if necessary.
1 tbsp of Passito di Pantelleria wine
1 egg yolk
150g of rapeseed oil
1 pinch of salt
Preheat a deep fryer to 180°C.
For the vegetable chips, dredge the sliced vegetables in flour. Fry in the deep fryer until golden and crispy, then drain on kitchen paper.
1 carrot
1 courgette
use plain flour, for dredging
Clean the foie gras and cut into escalopes. Heat a nonstick frying pan over a high heat and sear the foie gras on both sides until browned. Sprinkle with a pinch of sea salt and serve immediately.
1 lobe of foie gras
1 pinch of flaky sea salt
To plate, put a foie gras escalope inside a liquorice roll and garnish with the mango ketchup, Passito mayonnaise and vegetable chips.
The pink-haired chef Cristina Bowerman is the only female Michelin-starred executive in Rome and one of the very few worldwide. In this piece, she reflects on a life of abrupt changes and leaps in the dark as opportunities to challenge the stakes of tradition.
The pink-haired chef Cristina Bowerman is the only female Michelin-starred executive in Rome and one of the very few worldwide. In this piece, she reflects on a life of abrupt changes and leaps in the dark as opportunities to challenge the stakes of tradition.
Chef Cristina Bowerman. Photo by Carlo Roscioli. Courtesy of Glass Hostaria.
When I was first awarded a Michelin star in 2010, my restaurant had no tablecloths. For Glass Hostaria, which I’d joined four years earlier, it took time before its ambitious culinary ideas were justified by those passing through Trastevere, a quaint working-class district of Rome, enclosed instead by trattorias serving bowls of Cacio e Pepe and Carbonara on wooden surfaces covered with the quintessential red-and-white gingham.
Following my arrival as executive, I pitched new ideas for our menu. I wanted customers to eat with their hands a liquorice-flavoured sandwich, filled with a juicy fois gras lobe and sided with crunchy rice chips, a sharp mango ketchup and a fruity Passito wine mayo. They took me as a fool: nobody would bet on my success. In fact, at least initially, that dish was merely a source of business pessimism for stakeholders.
Yet, it marked the beginning of a new stage in my career and exemplified the strength I found to be different. It was, in every way, the signature dish of that footnote of my individual history.
I’ve always been wary of signature recipes set in stone, defining chefs in a seamless fashion. A dish might represent me perfectly today, but perhaps not tomorrow. Signature suggests stagnancy, which is the noun that goes farthest from my actual personality. As my nonna would say sardonically in praise of dynamism, there’ll always be time to rest… in peace.
After all, my life has been continuously astir. I left Cerignola, a rural village in the southern-Italian Apulia region where I was born, at 26 to complete my law studies in San Francisco. Despite practising law for two years, I shifted towards marketing first and graphic design later to express my creativity in motley forms, until an ad on a local newspaper promoting a newly-opened culinary school in Austin, Texas, triggered the pounding thought to change life again in my 30s.
Courage repeatedly saved me from an otherwise obvious path. I could be a spot-on woman, wife and mother, who would precisely abide by the subtle demands of a patriarchal society. I could even surrender to tradition holding at home my passion for cooking, never turning it into a proper job. This is the hiccup of tradition: potentially, it’s a springboard for success, but in turn it can also quite easily detain.
Women embody half of the workforce in kitchens worldwide. Still, it’s regrettable that, according to a report from the professional publication Chef’s Pencil, only 6% of the world’s top restaurants are led by female chefs. This trend just echoes the inequality women feel in several professional fields, always finding themselves defying the perilous gendered bias of not living up to their job requirements.
Food can do more than satiating eaters and fulfilling the ego of professionals with Michelin stars. Cuisine, I witness daily, is a cultural vehicle to push the envelope. Chefs have a responsibility: with my pink-haired revolution, I try and go beyond borders, speak out for communities of women worldwide to get rid of social constraints while rediscovering traditions and turning them into true treasures.
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Chef Cristina Bowerman actively takes part in a number of initiatives to raise awareness on food disorders that you can read about here. Among the others, in 2015, she promoted women artists and raised money for the NGO Action Aid.
Bowerman is also a member of Chefs’ Manifesto, an advocacy group of more than 1,100 chefs from 90 countries that agreed a common set of principles to drive progress against an array of food issues.
In 2021, Glass Hostaria was awarded the Michelin Green Star for its sustainable practices. To date, she remains the only female Michelin-starred chef in Rome and one of the very few worldwide.
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This is the first article of My Life In A Plate, a ghost-written column that gives voice to kitchen professionals around the world.
The liquorice-flavoured sandwich that marked the career of chef Bowerman, filled with a juicy fois gras lobe and sided with crunchy rice chips, a sharp mango ketchup and a fruity Passito wine mayo.
If words can communicate more than their written content, recent studies also suggest that letterforms can even have a unique taste with some perceived as saltier and others as sweeter
From the lines you are reading right now to the words written on the packaging of your dinner, fonts are ubiquitous carriers of the messages we read and digest every second.
But letterforms are capable of determining much more than their semantic content. Each preference conceals a tone, a mood, a gender stereotype, and might now also have a distinctive taste.
For Tablecloth’s cover logo we chose ‘Voor’, a font designed by Brazilian artist Renato Forster. The words you read throughout our stories are written in ‘Cormorant Garamond’, a Serif family created by Dutch designer Christian Thalmann. Both, we believe, embody the dainty but breezy character of our magazine.
Brands and their logotypes can become so intertwined that, without a continuous correlation, their identities could be also jeopardised. What would happen to Coca-Cola with no ‘Spencerian Script’ for its trademark? Or to Netflix without ‘Bebas Neue’, or Spotify with a typeface that is not ‘Gotham’?
Companies which had the bravado to take the risk and change, either ended up facing enduring criticism before customers familiarised with the move or had to bow to an about-face. In 2010, when clothing and accessories retailer Gap presented its new logo, it was soon forced to bring back the old Blue Box following comments that labelled the fresh one as “trash” or akin to a “pharma firm”.
Along with personality, the frontiers of debates on typography might be even expanded to taste. Research coordinated by the Department of Experimental Psychology at University of Oxford showed that people can match typefaces to taste words, like sweet, sour, salty and bitter, based on their roundness or angularity. Yet, this is not just about envisaging ‘Times New Roman’ as classic as a Full English Breakfast or a Shepherd’s Pie.
In two complimentary experiments, participants were given different pictures of the words ‘eat me’ written with fonts that ranged from more curvaceous to sloping shapes. Scholars asked them to arrange and combine each typeface to a taste word, and select those which they preferred and were easier to read.
The results demonstrated that people would single out rounded fonts as more readable. Processing fluency, as scholars described it, was received as an element that can positively alter the way fonts are perceived, for stimuli that are simpler to interpret might be experienced as more attractive.
“Legibility […] is proving to give some headway in terms of thinking about what are really the visual factors that affect the way we perceive, read and take in information,” said Professor Eric Kindel, Head of the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at University of Reading, who however dismisses studies solely based on psychological dispositions. “[Readability] moves away from personality as such and more towards attributes of letterforms, typefaces, and contexts of reading.”
But the way fonts are then associated to food tastes is in fact due to an affective correspondence. As sweet is commonly favoured as a pleasant taste, researchers state, people might relate it to words written with types that are more readable and popular. In turn, as fonts tend to become pointy, a connection with salty or bitter tastes can be triggered.
“Your very instinctive response is to curves and angles. Angular pointy shapes look aversive; we like curves, we don’t like angles,” said Sarah Hyndman, graphic designer who co-authored the paper and founded Type Tasting, a studio to measure emotional and multisensory responses to typography. “If something is putting you on alert with angles or scary shadows, then when you’re eating, you’re also still on alert for anything that might be sour, which means it’s possibly unripe or poisonous.”
The findings might be specifically relevant to designers and marketers, as logos and claims on the packaging could potentially lead buyers to anticipate a particular taste in the food they purchase.
“Something that goes unnoticed by most is that typography actually affects the entire consumer experience,” said Professor Carlos José Salgado, Director of NeuroSmart Lab at University of La Sabana who conducted research on how our behaviour as customers is influenced by shapes and colours. Fonts “also interfere in how we perceive foods, as well as the familiarity of brands or the softness of the fabric in a garment.”
What remains dubious is whether a predilection simply based on a hedonistic reaction to fonts might obscure health concerns over sweet products. As decisions at the grocery store are often taken subconsciously, a fair solution could lie in the middle – with a guilty plea made before getting to the tills.
“If you look in your shopping basket and think, ‘Oh, I’ve chosen that maybe because the packaging told me this, this, and this, but I’m still going to enjoy it anyway’, you should leave it” there, Hyndman said. “If you have a little bit more awareness of the process that you went through, that’s a win.”
Just so that you know, Tablecloth’s words are nothing to worry about. Our fonts are neither too sweet nor too salty but are disposed towards a slightly luscious and sugary aroma. We are nutritionists’ faves.
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This article is part of Laying the Table, the column that explores all the ingredients used in the making of Tablecloth magazine.
In the fight for climate justice, awareness is the beginning. For Earth Hour 2023, we recommend five fiction and non-fiction titles to understand the climate crisis and live in the Anthropocene
Young people protesting for climate change. Free-to-use photo supplied by Centre for Ageing Better.
Every era is marked by changes that define it through history. For the Earth, it all started with the Hadean, a geological eon commenced over four billion years ago as the planet formed. The hardening of its crust triggered the new time of the Archean; the Proterozoic brought about the first living organisms and slowly oxygenated the atmosphere. The most recent eon, the Phanerozoic, saw the wide emergence of complex life forms of animals and plants up to the era of the Holocene, when human history began.
But as human indomitable activity, colonial exploitation and capitalist greed damaged the world irreversibly, the need to declare a clear-cut epoch arose among scholars. We are now children of the Anthropocene.
Amid global climate activism, also literature responded. Essayists adjusted their monocles to assess the emergency and study possible pathways to change; poets and creative writers drew on the alterations yielded by the crisis and fed their imagery with dystopian dimensions through the burgeoning literary wave of climate fiction – or cli-fi.
Cli-fi, academics estimated, could even positively affect our behaviour. “Readerly engagement with evocations of a world irretrievably disrupted by climate change, ecological damage and species loss constitutes a rich and generative way that people are learning to understand and live with climate crisis [which] may constitute a step towards fighting for climate and environmental justice,” said Dr Miranda Iossifidis, lecturer of sociology at Newcastle University, who worked on a paper that investigated the effects of cli-fi.
Heat waves, wildfires, droughts and floods have been the symptoms of a depleting disease that we all gradually became aware of, but that decision-makers often wilfully overlooked.
Last year was declared U.K.’s hottest on record and the fifth worldwide, with temperatures exceeding 40C, as a damning report released by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in March 2023 issued a final warning to act before it is too late.
Rising temperatures and severe climate conditions lead millions to fall into penury. The World Bank, a financial institution that provides capital for international development, suggested that a staggering 26 million people are annually forced into poverty due to extreme weather.
“Storms, floods, and droughts have dire human and economic consequences, with poor people often paying the heaviest price,” said Jim Yong Kim, former president of the World Bank, in a statement published by the partnership.
Among the initiatives to spur a modest change, the WWF started a symbolic flash-mob in 2007 to shed light on climate change with a brief collective action. Earth Hour, the movement’s name, annually asks to take part in a mass effort to turn off electrical devices for just an hour, usually between 8:30pm and 9:30pm, on the last Saturday of March.
Over the years, Earth Hour soon achieved global, impressive milestones becoming the world’s largest grassroots group for the environment by 2009.
“Electricity savings are important because they demonstrate the potential role played by [people’s] behaviour,” said Dr Alan Meier, senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who co-authored a comparative analysis of the electricity impacts of the movement.
Some of the revolutionary attitude we are capable of, though, often starts with awareness. This is why we decided to review five fiction and non-fiction books that delve into this precarious time from different perspectives ahead of the next Earth Hour on 25 March.
‘Annihilation’ by Jeff VanderMeer
In this fictional novel on the effects of climate change, ‘Area X’ is a zone where an environmental cataclysm has engendered an ecosystem that might now perilously contaminate our world and transform it irredeemably.
Several previous expeditions of the fictitious governmental agency ‘Southern Reach’ into the area failed: some researchers committed mass suicide; others killed each other.
The latest attempt is made by the main characters of this book: four women, whose names are given by their professions (surveyor, anthropologist, psychologist and biologist). The biologist, who acts as narrator in the story, will take the reader through the horrifying, Lovecraftian world where nature takes its revenge.
But the madness of this unstable territory made of malformed creatures and slimy paths will try “to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality,” VanderMeer writes. Here lies the parallelism with climate change: confrontation becomes pivotal to avoid that what is confined in this eerie space reaches us.
‘The Water Knife’ by Paolo Bacigalupi
What if, in a very-near-future, access to water had to be contended in a war between companies? Or, what if “some people had to bleed so other people could drink,” as Bacigalupi suggests? These questions are the starting point of this other trailblazing cli-fi novel.
Angel Velasquez is a felon who is released from prison by Catherine Case, a ruthless business magnate.
She hires him to commit a series of crimes and destroy Arizona’s water supply, managed by a rival firm. For the sake of her profits, Velasquez – the ‘water knife’ – will investigate, spy and kill.
In the background of his endeavours, stifling torridity and parched lands are the grim effects of climate change that, given their daunting realism, will keep you short of breath.
‘Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency’ edited by Kate Simpson
In this collection, poetry is employed to “ask questions, subvert expectations and raise awareness” on the Anthropocene, writes Kate Simpson in her preface.
The poems are divided chronologically in five sections. ‘Emergency’ is an assessment of the current condition of our planet: “soil, rivers, oceans, seams of hot tar, broken glacier chips and molten yolk.”
Then comes ‘Grief’, where the reader can smell the forest where trees were felled, “ancient and piney, earth’s incense rising.”
The section of ‘Transformation’ marks the beginning of our redemption. We wonder: “what would the trees say about us? […] if they had to cut us down?” ‘Work’ and ‘Rewilding’ close the collection with a hopeful optimism: after correction, we realise “it is worth living, just to hold it.”
From each sale, 50p will be donated to Friends of the Earth, the UK’s largest grassroots environmental campaigning organisation, in celebration of their 50th anniversary.
And for the non-fiction fans…
‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ by David Wallace-Wells
Building on a New York magazine article that became the publication’s most viewed ever, the editor David Wallace-Wells tells you the truth, just the way it is, on climate change: it is “much worse than you think.”
This non-fiction book is a comprehensive reading of annals of climate denialist inactivity and the effects this produced and might generate in the future.
But if you ever wonder of acclimatising to statistics, outspoken facts will shake you out and remind you of the importance of immediate change.
This era will be marked by harrowing circumstances. Paraphrasing his words, ice sheets will start collapsing, global G.D.P. per capita will be cut by 13 percent, 400 million more people will experience water scarcity, major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unliveable, and heat waves will kill thousands each summer.
Yet, despite the gloomy predictions, action can still “bring a happy ending,” the author writes. A green energy transition, taxes on carbon emissions, as well as processes of carbon capture and underground storage can make for effective steps to prevent even worse scenarios.
‘Down to Earth’ by Bruno Latour
Politics is responsible for change. But how politics can change things remains a mystery.
For the late philosopher, who thoroughly studied the relation between politics, technology and science, the twentieth century has been defined by parallel counterparts: left and right; local and global. These, Latour argues in this essay, only led to an inefficacious position which is out-of-this-world and of static unawareness.
Through a decolonial approach, that focuses on nature rather than the individual, the intellectual offers ways to take the good of both poles and tackle the major issues of our zeitgeist. Rising inequality, mass migrations and climate change have progressively destroyed our soils; the paucity of a land where to live consequently turned all of us into ‘climate refugees’, the author says.
All nations should be protected from global hierarchies. Instead, an international orientation that is common to every state should be followed.
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We suggest buying these books second-hand and from a physical store. However, links used throughout the article will drive you to environmentally friendly websites.
A newly opened exhibition on the work of Peter Doig is one of the hottest talks of London. In a conversation with its curator, we took note of the best takeaways
When Peter Doig first moved to Trinidad, he wasn’t yet two years old. The early relocation from Edinburgh, his birthplace, marked the beginning of a series of moves that gradually turned his life into a roving collection of memories to handle with care.
Throughout his artistic production, photographs, songs and poems gathered on the road will repeatedly function as an inspirational source to set off emotions and fuel even Doig’s creative journey. Its trail can now be walked in an exhibition of paintings and etchings at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London open until May 29.
Peter Doig in his studio in Bethnal Green, London. Photo by Fergus Carmichael. Courtesy of The Courtauld Gallery.
Doig’s visions, not surprisingly, would spawn the unequivocal environments of his growth. But, despite their lucent realism, a consistent feeling of dislocation can as well be perceived in his works, as if the undoubted influence of each setting is not to seize his flair completely.
“I never try to create real spaces – only painted spaces,” said Peter Doig in a remark stuck on a wall of the gallery. “That may be why there is never really any specific time or place in my paintings.”
By only passing through the days and spaces of his life, Doig uses colours and brush strokes to portray scenes that unwittingly solve a dialectical problem of our time. His art proves to what extent experiences affected his perception of things but also how their diversification, disclosed through the mystery and strangeness of the unexpected, let him slip away from a cultural and ideological crystallisation.
Doig spent part of his childhood and teenage years in Montreal, Canada, and returned to London to pursue his ambition to become a painter. Here, he gained the formal mastery that would steer and nurture his painting career with riveting models spanning from Classical Greek art to American modernism.
Over the following decade, Doig would secure an international reputation as one of the leading contemporary artists of his time. Yet, as his acclaim led to a Turner Prize nomination in 1994, he soon hushed the suspicion that fame could blur the lines between establishment and attachment settling back to Trinidad in 2002.
The time on the island had a similar unfolding. The richly diverse culture of the Caribbean inspired much of his production with music, poetry and images that would serve as initial imaginative traces to sketch multiple works. However, just before he could become fully accustomed to the Trinidadian surroundings, several wandering punctuations in Europe and America would juxtapose his stay with other beneficial encounters. These would even keep him distant from the fervour triggered by the mind-blogging auction of ‘Swamped’ (1991), sold at Christie’s for the record-breaking price of $39.9 million in 2021.
The culmination of his voyage was a comeback to where it all started. For nearly two years Doig has come to Britain again and has a studio in Bethnal Green where he’s managed to relentlessly complete works commenced in Trinidad and periodically retrieved in Switzerland and Germany just in time for the opening of the display.
“Quite interestingly, the larger of our two rooms that the exhibition is in is about the same size as the studio where he paints in London,” said Dr Barnaby Wright, Deputy Head of The Courtauld and Daniel Katz Curator of 20th Century Art, who conceived this show directly with Doig and spoke to Tablecloth to explore how biography and techniques helped the artist to never put down roots in a place alone.
Q:How would you describe Doig’s painting to a new viewer?
One of the great strengths of the way that Doig paints, and the way that we respond to his paintings, is that they both feel very vivid and immediate. You are immersed in that painterly world that he creates. But at the same time, as you’re feeling very vivid, there is also this sense of distance and slight dislocation.
Night Bathers (2011-19) by Peter Doig. Pigment on linen. Courtesy of The Courtauld Gallery.
Q:Dislocation is a chronic element in Peter Doig that affects both his life and, consequently, the approaches taken in his artistic production more practically. Where does it stem from?
I think it has to do with the fact that he often paints from memory or from a photograph that provokes a memory. That lived experience somehow feeds into the such authentic way he paints, which is based on the collaging of memories, of found images, of the different forms that music often takes on and the way it appropriates different styles. In so doing, his lived experience and his creative experience come together through paintings.
Q:What does this suggest about the way he relates to the environment through his paintings?
There is nothing contrived about what he does. Doig never makes the mistake of thinking he is ever fully rooted or embodied anywhere that he is, of feeling like he is totally embedded. Of Trinidad, he absolutely loves and embraces the culture, the people, the music, but he always feels slightly outside of the place. He’s always one step removed.
Alice at Boscoe’s (2014-23) by Peter Doig. Oil paint on linen. Courtesy of The Courtauld Gallery.
Q:In works like ‘Alice at Boscoe’s’, where Doig portrays his daughter in a hammock in the garden of a family house he rented in Trinidad, the way he plays with paint and charcoal, as well as with linen, is also quite emblematic. Don’t you think it further reiterates the message of dislocation?
You are right. It’s interesting to see how he handles paint and the effect it has on our perception of the paintings and our experience of them. He’s found ways of painting in the way that we remember or half remember things: he feels very akin to trying to call up an image in your mind which is vivid in places and, all of a sudden, fades away. The various textures and thicknesses of paint that he uses, the way that they often bleed into one another, the colours and the forms, speak to and convey that very strongly.
Q:This is in a quite stark divergence from the rigidity of grids he employs in ‘Music Shop’ or ‘Night Studio’ to delineate and delimit the ambience outside. Do you see any metaphoric reading for that?
Yes, in those pictures that you mentioned, those grids are actually based on real window grills and door grills that he observed and painted from life. For instance, the music shop is actually based really closely on an actual shop in Port of Spain and, like quite a lot of the buildings in Trinidad, it has security grills on the window.
Music Shop (2019-23) by Peter Doig. Pigment on linen. Courtesy of The Courtauld Gallery.
Night Studio (STUDIOFILM & RACQUET CLUB) (2015) by Peter Doig. Oil paint on canvas. Courtesy of The Courtauld Gallery.
However, I think grids do have a symbolic quality very clearly. In ‘Music Shop’, they depict the theme of freedom versus incarceration, and the sense of shadows trying to walk through different spaces. Whereas, in ‘Night Studio’, they contribute to the moonlit atmospheres of the picture by contrasting complex planes and patterns.
Q:Speaking of which, the night seems to have a decisive role in Peter Doig’s art both at a creative and functional level. I noticed it as a common setting for several of the paintings displayed in the first part of the show.
Yes, we made a feature of night in our first room by having a series of nocturnes. It is really telling that Doig can only really get into the zone of painting during the night. He has talked in the past about liking to work when everyone else is dreaming. Things as we know do look strange, and the world does become a different, unsettling, more mysterious place of possibility and danger at night. He really pays off that quite a lot of his nocturnal works.
So, I believe that his paintings’ dreamlike quality that you sometimes feel in his oeuvre relates to that.
Q:As you said, night also conceals what we are not used to. Is this peculiar fascination for strangeness that endows many of his works with an eerie, weird patina?
Making the familiar strange is something that does reoccur in his work and, to a degree, as a sort of hallmark of his art. He is brilliant at bringing moments which you don’t quite know the context about into his painting, or at creating paintings that express those moments. You keep wondering where that sense of mystery is going to take you.
House of Music (Soca Boat) (2019-23) by Peter Doig. Pigment on linen. Courtesy of The Courtauld Gallery.
Q:Take the musicians replacing fishermen in ‘House of Music (Soca Boat)’: Doesn’t this atypical, almost surreal choice in representing subjects and their context add to his intention to make the familiar strange?
I agree, even though it is a homage to the backing band of Calypso music or Trinidadian swing music, those players do become anonymous unless you’re really knowledgeable about them. He leaves them only lightly finished; they appear like a fading memory in some regard that he brought out in that eerie way.
Q:Something analogous happens in ‘Alpinist’, right? As a viewer, I was astonished by the Alps and could almost feel the burden put onto the subject by the crossed skis on his back, which have a religious connotation, and by nature behind.
Yes, when you look at it, it’s almost vertiginous. It induces a state of anxiety in front of the magnificence of nature that the scale of the painting also helps create. Doig has managed to create a brilliant depth that engages with the big idea of the sublime, epic landscape that overwhelms the subject, who is genuinely awed by nature.
Alpinist (2019-22) by Peter Doig. Pigment on linen. Courtesy of The Courtauld Gallery.
Q:And then the skier is dressed with a harlequin costume.
Anecdotally, that picture goes right back into a romantic tradition, where Doig puts the subject in a harlequin costume as a sort of alter ego for an artist. I think he sees the artist’s creative journey as being one that is also quite daunting, intimidating and constantly hinged on nature, making them aware of their own relative insignificance.
Q:It is the first time that The Courtauld hosts the exhibition of a contemporary artist after it reopened in November 2021. How did curating a show on a living painter differ from presenting a retrospective? To what extent did Doig participate?
In working with Peter Doig, one of the first things we did was to show him and talk about the spaces. He thought very carefully about what works he was going to make for the exhibition, their scale and impact in relation to the room. I think with artists like Peter Doig, if you look back at his exhibition history, it’s tended to be really quite big survey shows of much of his career. Instead, what we wanted to do or thought that we could offer here was a smaller, more focused look at this recent body of works. You do get that sense of being in his studio and see the pictures that he made together in a room of a similar scale.
Q:How can you manage to keep the message big, truly enabling the exploration of an artist and their work, in the limited space Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries that is allocated to temporary exhibitions?
We very much design our exhibitions with that specific space and scale in mind. Over the years, we have wanted to make types of exhibitions that you perhaps don’t see elsewhere in London. This approach offers something different; it encourages people to slow down, to spend more time with fewer works, and to get rather deeply engaged with a hopefully very exciting or interesting episode from art history or aspect of an artist’s work. Moreover, the idea of looking more closely at and putting out more research and insight also feels quite appropriate as The Courtauld is a university art gallery.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Morgan Stanley Exhibition: Peter Doig is sponsored by Morgan Stanley and supported by Kenneth C. Griffin and the Huo Family Foundation, with additional support from the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne.
