Peter Doig, Courtauld Gallery review — modern master holds his own among Impressionist greats

In “Night Studio (Studiofilm and Racquet Club)”, the life-size self-portrait which opens the Courtauld Gallery’s small, superb exhibition of his recent and new work, Peter Doig lolls back into his canvas, becoming the character he is depicting — the man from his earlier painting, “Stag”, who clings to a tree, tangled up in juicy yellow and green leaves. Some of the foliage, abstracted in Doig’s laconic, luminous dots and dabs, encircles his head like a halo. Doig often paints through the night, and an electric glare illumines the scene, giving his skin odd hues — orange-umber face tinged dark pink, bluish-brown arm. There are also his gorgeous decorative and geometric elements — blots of light-like snowflakes, a grid structure through which we glimpse a game of racquetball.

It’s a huge painting, pulling you close up into its strangeness in the Courtauld’s cramped first gallery — a captivating piece of theatre of a man building a world within a world. Brilliantly evocative yet elusive, it declares the high artifice underpinning all of Doig’s work and the mind as his chief landscape. “I never try to create real spaces — only painted spaces. That’s all I’m interested in,” he has said.

That he can make these spaces simultaneously convincing, enchanted and eerie has allowed Doig tremendous freedom and ambition — including as a white artist defining his own vision of Trinidad, a former British colony. The Scotsman lived there for two decades, returning to make his permanent home in London in 2021; this is his first exhibition since, and unfolds what has happened to his painting in a tumultuous period. Doig separated from his first wife, with whom he brought up five children in Trinidad, in 2012. (She died in 2019). He is now remarried with a second young family.

The Trinidad painting “Night Studio” (2015), the show’s oldest piece, is the frame through which we understand his subsequent shifting sense of the island as a site of nostalgia and remembrance. The new works, mostly dated 2019-23, are enthralling. They maintain the uncanny mood of alienation — Doig once claimed he aims for “numbness” — which characterised his filmic paintings from the start of his career, yet despite the affectless look, these go far deeper than before, engaging on a more emotional level and with the events of our times.

Beneath a rusty steel roof at the doorway of “Music Shop” stands Doig’s friend, calypso singer Winston Bailey, known as Shadow, black-cloaked in his skeleton costume with Borsalino hat, guitar flung over his shoulder. The shop facade is a stage flat decorated with musical instruments; through its barred windows we see not the interior but views of a seascape. The composition alludes to Doig’s pictures-within-pictures statement painting “House of Pictures (Carrera)” (2004), a half-built film-set wall of windows giving on to the Caribbean Sea. But the figure alters everything: Shadow, who died in 2018, stalks the scene like Death itself. The painting is about fate, fear, memory, as well as the complexities of picture-making.

Beginning with “Music (2 Trees)” (2019), calypso players serenading his wife against a wistful tropical landscape of thin turquoise, cream and Eau de Nil washes melting into one another, the motif of musicians threads seductively through the show — their rhythms, improvisational energy, dying cadences. Doig’s source for “House of Music (Soca Boat)” was a photograph of fishermen; he transformed the image into a vessel full of Caribbean singers and guitarists sailing across waves of translucent watery paint in a moonlit canvas. The distant shore could be Cythera; the black players in their white costumes, centred on a Pierrot figure, are as whimsically lovely and enigmatic as Watteau’s — full of yearning and mystery. Everything feels just out of reach, the music fading away. We think inevitably of migrant ships, struggles to reach safe shores from the peril of the sea, and of hostile or endangered nature.

So too in the monumental, muscular yet pallid “Bather”. Derived from Cézanne’s statuesque “Bather” and a photograph of actor Robert Mitchum in 1942, this figure in swimming trunks stands in uneasy, incongruous relationship with the cold, washed-out landscape. The other side of Paradise is also suggested in the nocturne “Night Bathers”: Trinidad’s popular Maracas Bay as a phosphorescent shimmer, heavy with foreboding. The two reclining figures, disconnected, far apart, depicted at wildly differing scales, could be beached up from a Surrealist dream or a horror movie.

“Alice at Boscoe’s” (2014-23), features Doig’s daughter, almost spectral, swinging in a hammock overhung with plants. The patterned red tiles around her are much more vibrant than the slumbering girl, whose ghostly form seems like an image for holding on to memory itself. Infused with melancholy, the composition exemplifies Doig’s equilibrium between specific rendering and hazy atmosphere — how remembrance works.

That he can make these spaces simultaneously convincing, enchanted and eerie has allowed Doig tremendous freedom and ambition

Finished for this show, “Alice” surely influenced the brand new London picture “Canal”, dominated by a bright red brick bridge. We enter this painting through the gaze of Doig’s blond, wide-eyed young son, sitting on the towpath with his breakfast of fried eggs. The setting is north London’s Regent’s Canal, though we’re unsure when — snow flurries and bare trees on one side, autumn leaves turning golden on the other — or even of the epoch.

The child is vivid, present-tense, but the bargeman blurry as in an old photograph. The wan light and murky greenish water made me recall the place as it was in the 1970s — the denouement of espionage thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy unravelled on the banks of this canal. And the painting’s art-historical references stretch far back, reinforcing a feeling of timelessness: Derain’s dazzling London bridges, Matisse’s son’s pale head among abstract forms in “The Piano Lesson”, Manet’s “The Railway” where we similarly enter an urban landscape through a figure looking out and beyond.

Where will Doig the global flâneur go next? “Alpinist”, the Courtauld’s poster image, signals a return to his snow paintings, here centred on a solitary skier, elegantly bizarre in his harlequin suit — another allusion to Watteau, and to Cézanne’s “Harlequin”. He leans forward uncertainly on grey-blue streaks of slushy-icy ground, beautiful but dangerous. The fir trees in the valley beneath the glittering Matterhorn are so many triangle shapes echoing the lozenges of the costume. It’s magisterial and ambivalent — balancing tensions between nature and civilisation, abstract mark-making and representation, flights of imagination versus human vulnerability.

It’s entirely appropriate that Doig is the first contemporary painter to have an exhibition in the Impressionist stronghold of the Courtauld. No living artist has derived so much from interrogating paths opened by Manet, Monet, Cézanne, and few could hold their own so impressively and fascinatingly in such company.

To May 29, courtauld.ac.uk