Peter Doig

Peter Doig, Friday 13th 1999*

I watched the movie Friday the 13th as a young teenager with school chums, one eye open, head peeping out behind a cushion. It was horrifying stuff.

The last frame depicted the sole survivor, a young girl, apparently safe from the horrendous ordeal, lying peacefully in a boat on a lake.
Suddenly and unexpectedly a sludgy green hand thrusts out of the water and with a roar, a gangrene monster of a man grabs her from behind. It is literally terrifying. It must have been. Because it has been over ten years since I watched that film and it still sticks in my mind.

The eerie image of a lone figure in a single canoe repeats itself in Peter Doig’s paintings. Sometimes in the background, sometimes as the main subject, but it pops up again and again.
Without knowing that Doig based (what is now an iconic symbol in his work) on this scene from Friday the 13th, you would be mistaken for seeing the canoe as a peaceful depiction, a romantic ideal of being alone with nature.

But armed with this knowledge a subtle shift in mood is brought to the vast landscapes of such paintings as The Milky Way or the surreal Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre painted over ten years later.
The still before the storm ; an underlying tension.

Going to art school in London in the early 80’s meant that Doig’s contemporaries where producing art of an unashamedly brash and foul-mouthed nature compared to his emerging style.
For years he painted in his spare time not managing to make a living from his - at the time - unfashionable paintings, slightly too kitsch or twee, perhaps, in the face of the bizarre or downright shocking.

In this period Doig said himself that he wanted to bring a, “ ‘homeliness’ into art”.  His early paintings fit together like collages, or more to the point like a homemade quilt.
Taking the Canadian terrain as a basis for many,  and then reconstructing it in his minds-eye, his images are fantastical and beautiful visions, oozing colour and pattern. Totally irresistible for the viewer. 

Another side to Doig is his fusion between urban and natural environments, usually architecture and forests.
 The taught geometric forms of a building are broken up by the natural curve of trees, a feature in much of his early 90’s painting.
They are painted from an eye level view so you feel as if you are in the wood itself walking up to the building, like a refuge from the dark forest, partly obscured in the distance.

Also using much photographic imagery,  his late 90’s paintings are much looser, less stylised and more hazy.
 Ski Jacket, an incredible painting taken from a newspaper photograph of a Japanese ski resort fuses figures with the background, and the mountainous landscape with the canvas so that you are not quite sure where the pattern ends and the picture beings.
The multi-coloured ski jackets look like hundreds and thousands on an iced cake. Part divine wonderland part abstract painting.

The last two rooms of the exhibition show his recent work, based on themes from Trinidad, where he now lives.
Some of these seem to have a touch of Gauguin’s work in Tahiti; they are bolder, brighter, stronger and larger forms than previous works.
In fact, there is something distinctly European. The paintings seem to have links to both German Expressionism and Fauvism in its naïve nature, palette and  brush strokes.

Other new works are strangely remote from the artist’s usual style.
Man Dresses as Bat created in 2007 sees, perhaps, a turning point for Doig. The painting is a washed out silhouette of a bat like man.
Faded pastel colours are painted like tea-stains on a dishcloth. A partly lost memory,  grasped only in our mind,  a powerful suggestion of an image is shown.
“People have confused my paintings with being just about my own memories. Of course we cannot escape these. But I am more interested in the idea of memory”  he says.

His work is a  sheer pleasure as you dive head first into his illusionary worlds.
Peter Doig is a master of painting. His work  is full of soul:  a detatched and ambiguous soul, maybe, but present nonethless.

Julie Pallot

Peter Doig, Tate Britain, Millbank, London,  SW1P 4RG, until 27th April
Tickets

*Courtesy of Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, c The Artist,

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