PETER DOIG | SMELL THE OIL PAINT
Is it my imagination, or can you still smell the oil paint?
Peter Doig (born 1959), Alpinist, 2019-22, pigment on linen. Private collection, courtesy of Courtauld Gallery The Scottish-born artist Peter Doig moved back to England in 2021 after 20 years living in Trinidad, and this fine exhibition of twelve large canvases represents work that he has since created – or in most cases finished off – in his East London home-cum-studio.
Though ‘finished off’ might be pushing it a bit. Doig is well known for returning to paintings over a period of years (as well as pushing right up to the crest of deadlines) and you get the feeling that one or two of these might yet see some more time on the easel.
Take The Alpinist, a monumental showstopper which has understandably been used in much of the publicity material advertising the show. An orangey-brown-faced figure wearing a harlequin costume trudges up a slushy slope, with his skis criss-crossed on his back, the peak of the Matterhorn looming behind him. As ever, with Doig, it’s a game of guess the art-history references: a bit of Picasso, obviously, a hint of Cézanne maybe, a dollop of Casper David Friedrich. Is this Christ-on-holiday, lugging his cross up an Alp?
Look closely at the skier’s head, and you’ll see that what at first looks like a brown mop of hair, is in fact an unpainted-over area of canvas linen, annotated with the word ‘willow’, in pencil. Is that a yet-to-add colour reference? Are we invited to imagine a willow-green bobble hat? Or is the painting’s incompleteness a part of its message?
The glorious thing is: it doesn’t matter. In these few canvases, Doig – arguably Europe’s most successful and influential living figurative painter – has produced a memorably diverse body of work, which takes us from the calypso-tinged Caribbean island to the banks of the Regent’s Canal, introducing us to a variety of colourful characters. These include his wife, sat side-saddle on a horse, his daughter, lying louchely in a hammock, his youngest son, contemplating a plate of alfresco fried eggs, the ebullient soca singer Shadow, a refiguration of a bare-chested Robert Mitchum, and the artist himself, standing in his Port-of-Spain studio.
On this trans-Atlantic journey, the artist successfully incorporates an impressive variety of stylistic experiments – playing with colour, and tone, and perspective, and mood, and abstraction – which brings me to my next point. To get to his show, you walk through the room in which the Courtauld displays its collection of instantly recognisable post-impressionist treasures, by the likes of van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne. In doing so, you’re inevitably struck by the gallery’s boldness in choosing – for the first time since its 2021 refurb – a living artist for this temporary exhibition space: will Doig’s work be able to stand up alongside such seminal works?
The answer, I would suggest, is a resounding ‘yes’. Figurative art has been much maligned in the last twenty years and more, but Doig’s latest show is a bold assertion that the medium is now thriving again, able to assimilate lessons from the past, and run with them, towards an exciting, unforeseeable future. At the Courtauld, there’s an open doorway between the past masters, and their inventive apprentice: you can smell the oil paint, and thank god for that.
The Morgan Stanley Exhibition: Peter Doig. The Courtauld Gallery, 10 – May 29