Peter Doig’s got some figuring out to do. The Scottish-Canadian artist has always captured everything in a haze of quickly dissipating coloured fog. His images are nostalgic reveries for something you’re not sure you can even remember, but there’s something else going on in this show, a sort of mini emotional crisis played out in paint.
The new works here are full of darkness, fragile masculinity and references to Doig’s past output. The main group of paintings features a topless male lifeguard. He’s a classic figure from 1950s cinema: barrel-chested, bronzed to a crisp, ludicrously muscular and masculine in high-waisted trunks. In the biggest work, he’s defined and clear, in the others he melts into the air or bleeds and bloats into the canvas, his features leaching into corpse-like nothingness. In the background of each work a man wrestles with a snake – and it looks like he’s losing.
In a separate painting, the moon emerges from a tropical sea with three figures in the foreground. One is an ice hockey player – maybe it’s Doig himself, or maybe it’s a reference to the snow paintings of his past – but he seems to evaporate. The other figures are black, their lines are solid, bold, their bodies opaque. In the background there are palm-tree-lined islands, a skiff sailing past – all nods to previous work. There’s murder here, violence too, and fear of the modern world.
The male figures are bruised, battered, near death, on the verge of non-existence, they’re fighting and failing.
The work downstairs is older, showing the lion of Judah prowling outside a prison on the heat-soaked streets of Trinidad (where Doig lives). They’re nice paintings, classic Doig for the most part, but they lack the vulnerability and panic of the works upstairs.
And it’s that panic, that hugely personal freak-out that Doig seems to be having, the weakness he’s showing, that makes this work so good. It’s classic mid-life crisis material: fear of being forgotten, fear of emasculation, fear of annihilation and irrelevance. Just be thankful he’s turned all that into art instead of buying a Ferrari.
@eddyfrankel
