‘PETER DOIG’

Courtauld Gallery, London 

”I never try to create real spaces - only painted spaces. That’s all I am interested in.”
-Peter Doig

Strange 'n' Foreign

As these exhibition posts gave away some while ago, there’s not many contemporary artists which interest me. And the few that do, they don’t turn out to be painters all that much. Then I finally find one, and it turns out he’s really something of a throwback to Modernism.

Click on that link above, and you’ll discover the show effectively sold itself on the basis that Doig… deep breath… “has long admired the collection of The Courtauld Gallery and the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists who are at its heart have been a touchstone for [his] own painting and printmaking over the course of his career. Visitors will be able to consider Doig’s contemporary works in the light of paintings by earlier artists in The Courtauld’s collection that are important for him, such as those by Cézanne, Gauguin, Manet, Monet, Pissarro and Van Gogh.”

All true, except I’d be tempted to head that list with Gauguin. Similarly to his Tahitian escapades, Edinburgh-born Doig spent twenty years in Trinidad. In his case his parents took him there as a child. But there’s a similar sense of art which is rich with strangeness, evoking exotic locations.

’Music (2 Trees)’ (2019, above) even looks like folk art. Partly due to the naive style, achieved partly by painting pigment on linen, leading to colours as deep as oil but as loose and flowing as watercolour. The figures are arranged in a neat diagonal, the two guitars aligned across it, but the rough cropping makes the work look casual. This pushes those figures into the foreground, as though they’re outside the frame. An effect enhanced by their being in such bold colours. The title suggests we should see the trees as representing the sound of their music, which in itself suggests those legends of the landscape being conjured up by song or ritual.

’Alpinist’ (2109/22, above) also places a figure before a landscape, only before a quite different landscape and in a quite different way. He’s not just brightly coloured, he’s painted near life size. If this were a painting of ordinary size and dimensions, that would mean he dominated. But with this extended work (nearly three metres tall) your eye first falls on those crossed skis.

A harlequin outfit in a painting, particularly on a solitary figure. It’s perhaps needless to say but this doesn’t mean a jolly entertainer - in fact, precisely the reverse. And the figure trudges downcast away from the background, the skis less a mode of transport than a cross to bear. But there’s parallels throughout, the cross of the skis against that mountain peak, the diamonds of that outfit against the triangles of trees behind him. A relatively straightforward-looking image turns out to be rich with ambiguities.

’Night Bathers’ (2011/19, above) is one of several works set at night. And we’re told Doig liked to paint during darkness. Though we can see the sea well enough, I like to think those figures are actually bathing in the blue of moonlight. They seem to shimmer, to float eerily, like apparitions. And there’s a stillness to the scene, you can’t picture them getting up and walking away. To the Courtauld’s list above, perhaps we need to add Whistler’s nocturnes.

An Outsider’s Eye

But we might get closer to the heart of Doig with ’Music Shop’ (2109/23, above), which notably also goes back to both the figure-before-a-setting motif, and the music theme. The naive style is emphasised by that blocky foreground figure, one arm hanging straight down, the other seemingly just a placed hand. While in a kind of visual gag the guitar he clutches is not so different to the double bass flatly painted on that shop wall.

The shop fills the frame, and through its windows isn’t an interior but an exterior, a seafront scene. Entering the shop is to enter Trinidad, with the guitar not a purchase but a badge of entry. He looks around, but not back at us, more as if he’s checking he’s not followed.

Doig surely is influenced by Gaugin, but almost as a rejoinder. Gauguin was forever keen to convince you he fitted in to the spaces he painted, the bohemian more at home while abroad. And after a while this becomes like that white guy who’s forever telling you how many cool black mates he has, without you ever seeming to meet any.

Whereas, as the show says, Doig “has an etherial quality that makes everything feel just out of reach”. He paints with an outsider’s eye, depicting a folk culture rich with meanings which are foreign to us. (And in fact we’re told that figure, with his distinctive coat, is a known character in Trinidadian culture. Perhaps appropriately, I’ve already forgotten his name.) The show includes a poem from Derek Walcott to Doig which sums this up well, starting with “Will your brush pick up an accent/ And singsong infect your melody?”

Not that this outsiderness was confined to Trinidad. ’Canal’ (2023) was painted post his return, in fact very shortly before the show its now hung in. And its of a London towpath probably not too far from here. The green table pushes out of the frame, suggesting the child is sitting right opposite us, while the double-yolked egg suggests shared activity.

Yet the child doesn’t meet our eye and the painting also recedes far into the distance (emphasised by the red lines traced on the towpath), and seems ungraspably strange. The sky is a nocturnal grey yet everything seems brightly lit, reds, greens and blues as bold as primary colours. (In an ambiguous effect similar to ’Alpinist’.) Perhaps Trinidad affected Doig enough to make him an outsider even when he was back in Britain. Or perhaps its not citizenship but being an artist which is the crucial distinction, with the eye that’s always framing scenes, always looking in on places.

Eddy Frankel, writing in ‘Time Out’, had a slightly different takeaway. Perhaps riffing on so many of these works being finished after Doig had decamped to London (hence those long creation dates), he saw in them…

“…brutal, almost uncomfortable nostalgia. Because nostalgia isn’t pleasant, it’s a longing for the past, something you can never have… to me, this is Doig grasping, reaching out, trying desperately, feverishly to hold on to those memories, and failing. That's why there’s this constant interplay between haze and solidity, foggy mess and thick lines; some of each memory is vivid, almost real and tangible, and other bits are fading inescapably away forever.”

But to me this disregards the way something like ’Canal’ makes you feel so present and simultaneously so estranged, so there and yet so not. But what might be more notable is what these views have in common. Even as we stand and look at these paintings, all straightforward views onto pictorial space, we understand they have some elusive quality to them which we will never get at.

This show may have the advantage of showing Doig in context. But it isn’t large, comprising precisely twelve paintings and twenty works on paper. Apparently he had a fuller show at the Whitechapel back in the Nineties, and hopefully he’ll be given another soon. But for now these provisional findings will have to suffice…