Peter Doig
"Peter Doig" by Sarah Stanners, Summer 2008, p. 84
Peter Doig makes return trips in his work and life from Scotland to Trinidad, to Canada, to England and back again—and again. His passport may suggest geographical estrangement, but it shows to good effect in his work. In hosting this exhibition, Tate lays claim to the artist as a British citizen, but the paintings themselves are shiftier about origins.
Doig’s perspective plays with proximity, gained through both memory and photography. Many of his Canadian scenes, for example, were painted in his studio in London, England. The frequently reproduced Country Rock (1998 –99) is not just a fleeting recollection of the Canadian landscape in Doig’s thoughts; for those who pass this painted pedestrian tunnel on the Don Valley Parkway in Toronto, it is practically an icon, part of a mutual memory. In a conversation between Doig and Chris Ofili presented in the catalogue, Ofili remarks, “Everyone’s Canadian to you.”
This survey exhibition contains paintings from the last two decades of Doig’s career. Large-scale oils and a telling selection of works on paper have been carefully hung throughout eight rooms with sight lines in mind. Room 4 (a.k.a. the snowy room), with its radiant candy-colour tones, for instance, looks ethereal when seen from a room of darker paintings in which Doig experiments with visual effects by picturing Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation apartment building screened by trees.
Doig’s application of paint is honest, but his imagery is suggestive of something else, and somewhere else. His paintings from the last five years are beautifully strange. The artist has lived in Trinidad since 2002, which to most Canadians who survived this past winter is surely a sign of genius. Man Dressed as Bat (2007) is labelled oil on linen, but might be better described as linen suffused with oil. Doig’s sensitivity to colouring and application could make him a contemporary Colour Field artist. Like Man Dressed as Bat, the painting Figures in Red Boat (2005–07) seems to show evidence of a dripped stain technique, which is conducive to a perfect marriage between the artist’s keen sense of materials and his dreamlike subjects.
Doig has said, “My paintings of lakes, canoes, and cabins were interpreted differently in a Canadian context. Canadians related to them in a way that other people didn’t.” True enough: for one viewing Doig’s work from a Canadian perspective, there are frequent twinges of familiarity, but it is still a strange familiarity. A mysterious lakeside scene featuring a lone black-and-white cop car and a hollow-eyed figure who stares out at us from the shore has an undeniably eerie effect. The moments of recognition make Doig’s peculiar scenes somehow more potent. After all, it’s being away from home that makes home even more attractive, and, according to this extraordinary exhibition, hindsight is everything.
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
