The first painting you see in the Courtauld Gallery’s Peter Doig exhibition is a self-portrait. Dressed like a trendy teenager in sneakers and slacks, the performer’s face resembles an anatomical mannequin with the skin peeled back. Doig’s posture mirrors that of a sweaty man in his earlier painting, Deer (2002-05), who slumps to rest against a tree trunk in a deserted forest. In the strange artificial light of studio at night (Studiofilm & Racquet Club) (2015), we go back and forth from one earlier moment in Doig’s life to another, from a feverish tropical location to an air-conditioned studio, and from reality to fiction. Another man’s head, older and in green with a beard, and almost indistinguishable from the uncontrolled ivy, stares impossibly over the performer’s shoulder as if foreshadowing the future. We are everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Doig has spent much of his life traveling and reinventing himself in new cultures. These recent images on display at the Courtauld were mostly made between 2019 and 2023 and show his wandering eye for unusual shapes. Born in Edinburgh to an itinerant father who worked for a shipping company, Doig emigrated as an infant first to the tropics of Trinidad and then to the snowy vistas of Canada. In their warmth and their ice, these two natural palettes often surround and envelop the lost figures that populate his paintings. After studying in London in the 1980s (at the art schools of Wimbledon, Saint Martin and Chelsea), Doig returned to Trinidad and spent the next two decades painting otherworldly and sometimes hallucinogenic figurative paintings inspired by by calypso music and the lush vegetation around Port of Spain. . During this period, he is rightly recognized as one of the best colorists of his generation.
The bridge glows a Klimtian crimson while the canal water is an algae green so thick it resembles an overgrown lawn
Doig has recently set up a studio in London, and the capital has become a new subject for his idiosyncratic landscape revisions. In the ethereal universe of Channel (2023), which sees North London’s beloved Regent’s Canal pushed backward through a nightmarish Edvard Munch cityscape, Doig’s son sits silently by a plate of eggs while a young man dressed in dull kitchen sink overcoat drives a houseboat. I guess we are close to the towpath in Haggerston, where I walk every day. Here, the bridge shimmers a Klimtian crimson while the canal water is an algae green so thick it resembles an overgrown lawn. It is unmistakably London and yet resolutely a place that exists only in Doig’s prismatic memory.
Price and pallet
This exhibition of recent work by Doig is the first by a contemporary artist alongside Courtauld’s renowned collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings since the gallery’s £57m three-year revamp in 2021. Denise Coates exhibition hall, named after the billionaire founder of gambling company Bet365, it’s a cramped display of just two rooms that will make some visitors cringe at the £14 ticket price. He could have used an extra bedroom. Many of the paintings themselves depict rest and leisure but never feel carefree, or at least not in the way that Édouard Manet’s neighboring study for Luncheon on the Grass (1863-68) feels carefree, despite shared subjects and palettes. Inspired by the phosphorescence on the sea, Night swimmers (2011-19) finds us in Maracas Bay in Trinidad in a nocturnal reverie where a blue woman and a gray man, alone together, face each other.
Mountaineer (2019-22), which is predictably Courtauld’s marketing image, sees a carnivalesque skier draped in a harlequin outfit, the mischievous outsider’s trademark dress in Paul Cézanne’s paintings and Pablo Picasso. The dimensions hit you like a rockslide on a mountain face. The canvas itself towers over visitors, creating a sublime relationship between us and the Matterhorn behind, and the Pierrot-like figure is just half our height. The world is big; that poor boy, in a mischievous costume and wandering helplessly inside. We find ourselves both intimately close to the harlequin and yet alienated by his recessed side and his incongruous outfit, as one would have the impression of falling on a costumed celebrant of a bachelor party without a party. It reminds me of lines from Window shutter, poem by Derek Walcott, the late St. Lucian poet and friend of Doig: “A steep sheet of snow becomes a page to draw / for Peter Doig and a ski slope his fiction, / a whiteness whose width begs to be explored / in where the real looms, a contradiction. Without a doubt, this is a fictional spectacle filled with conflicting realities.
Derek presents itself as a magnificent elegiac testimony of friendship
One of the highlights of Doig’s humble takeover of the Courtauld is not in the main exhibition hall, but in the quieter one tucked away on the first floor, where his prints made of, for or in tribute to Walcott. Most were made in 2017, the year Walcott died, and these little gems speak to the traveling nature of Doig’s artistic practice. They depict hunting dogs on the prowl and otherworldly plants stretched out in spectral blacks and reds. Derek (Studiofilmclub) (2016) is a larger work in Doig’s more familiar pigment-on-linen materials, and depicts the poet not on the page but near an easel, playing on a canvas that bears the words “morning/paramin” ( the name of a poem-pictorial collaboration the pair published the same year). As the verdant hills stretch beyond Walcott’s curving sunhat that radiates baroque yellow, the work stands as a magnificent elegiac testament to friendship.
To the left of the portrait is a lyric poem addressed to Doig by Walcott, titled Peter, I’m glad you invited me. In it, Walcott discusses the artist’s synesthetic ability to evoke music with paint: “Will your brush pick up an accent, and sing/infect your melody hidden in a canvas? , / will choose where you really belong”. The poem then asks many more questions about its subject, but it’s clear that Doig seems to have spent his entire career trying to figure out his place. Trinity? Canada? London? Does he really belong alongside some of Manet’s best, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh, those masters of color who seem to be able to capture the inner life of their subjects lost in an abandoned world? Maybe not, or maybe not yet. But while we wrestle with these questions, we can’t help but walk away happy that Doig asked us to.
• Courtauld Gallery, London, until May 29, 2023, curator: Barnaby Wright
What Other Reviewers Said
In a short review for The Guardian, Rachel Cooke cautioned against seeing Doig’s famous seductive shades as some kind of balm for a long end of winter: “His vast canvases are not solar lamps for the soul.” Cooke was particularly enamored with Alpinist, which “struck me like a masterpiece with the force of an avalanche; it should belong to a major museum, not (as it does) to a private collector”.
Jackie Wullschlagerfor the Financial Times, was particularly enthusiastic about the artist’s ability to create strange new worlds, with flashes of Trinidad, London and the Alps in the same series: “The fact that he could make these spaces feel compelling, enchanted and eerie at the same time allowed Doig enormous freedom and ambition.”
Meanwhile, in the Evening Standard Ben Luke (who is also editor of The Art Newspaper) gave a glowing five-star review and proclaimed Doig’s “magnificence among the masters”. While drawing attention to how descriptions of Doig’s paintings can seem twee and sentimental, Luke enthused about how his surreal and vivid use of color demonstrates that “few artists paint so beautifully today. ‘today’.
