Peter Doig's hypnotic landscapes

About the exhibition "Peter Doig" at the Courtauld Gallery in London until 29 May 2023.

When you see the prices that works of art for sale by Peter Doig, the Scottish-born British painter who became one of the world's most expensive contemporary artists on the art market in 2007, you smile to think that when he painted Swamped in 1990, he had a hard time finding a buyer. This curious white canoe floating on the water on a dark night, on the edge of a desolate landscape reminiscent of the last image in the horror film Friday the 13th, sold for the equivalent of $1000 with difficulty. In 2015, the painting was sold for $25.9 million. So you should never lose hope? In any case, the lure of money has never caused this painter born in Edinburgh in 1959 to deviate from his path. Even now that his paintings inspired by natural or urban landscapes are causing a stir on the contemporary art market, he paints no more than three to six per year. Which makes it a concentrate of pure sensations.

Swamped - Peter Doig

The rest of the time, he travels, he observes, he works. This has always been his method. After spending his youth in Trinidad, with a father working in the maritime trade, he came to study at the Wimbledon School of Art and then at the Saint Martin's School of Art in London, then left to live in Canada, before returning to study at the Chelsea School of Art in London, without hesitating at 31 to start painting intensely alongside 20-year-old students full of enthusiasm and determination. An "ultra-productive period", Elisabeth Couturier points out in her article for Connaissance des arts in March. His work emerged in the early 1990s, notably thanks to a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1991. "His efforts were rewarded with a nomination for the Turner Prize in 1994. And over the years, by the affirmation of a fluid figurative style: an expanse of water and its reflections become pretexts for the treatment of matter, as do cast shadows or dense vegetation. But in his strange images there is a suspicious calm and tranquillity. More often than not, a few rare characters appear, lost in landscapes that carry dark forces, inspired by the exuberant Caribbean nature or by the frozen lakes of the Canadian Far North. Places where the artist has lived.

Peter Doig has lived and worked in so many cities around the world, including London, New York, Trinidad and Tobago, Berlin... that it's hard to get lost! Married twice, this father of seven is a nomadic artist. At 62 years of age, he now divides his time between London, which has become his home port once again after Trinidad, where he needed to rediscover the fragrances of his childhood, New York and Düsseldorf, where he teaches. Following his trajectory is dizzying, because according to his own calculations, he has already lived in more than two hundred houses! And the geographical diversity of Peter Doig's career, fascinated by landscapes where man's relationship with nature is constantly at stake, ultimately marks his work, which has gradually been built around a quest for authenticity. Relying on the work of the material, playing with textures, pure and mixed colours, solarisation effects, halos and wandering focus, the artist paints pictures whose presence is bewitching. No univocal reading is possible in front of a work of art by Peter Doig.

"His paintings have an enormous presence because he is demanding and extremely inventive, as much in terms of subjects as in terms of shapes and colours. Each painting is a miracle," says Fabrice Hergott, who exhibited at the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris in 2008. Stéphane Aquin, who curated an exhibition of the artist's work in 2013 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, is convinced: "There is a Peter Doig effect. These paintings activate areas that are rarely solicited, those of the deep psyche. It is hypnotic. Full of surprises; Doig leads us into a space of painting that puts us in a second state (...) Objects, shapes, characters, strident colour lines have a psychedelic resonance". So much so that the journalist from Connaissance des arts asks the question: "Like a psychotropic drug?" Recalling that in 2014, the artist himself had confided that he had been deeply marked by the experience of taking acid at the age of 15, seeing his usual environment disintegrate before his eyes.

Nevertheless, Doig's paintings are characterised by a remarkable technique and a great attention to colour and light. Many of his works therefore represent imaginary or real landscapes, such as forests, lakes, mountains and rivers, often with a strange or mysterious atmosphere. Wild, undefined places through which man passes, leaving a trace: empty canoes, houses of seasonal workers, solitary silhouettes in front of floating mists... He also explores the themes of memory, identity and culture. In addition to the numerous awards they have earned him, his work is on display in the world's major public and private collections, galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Britain in London and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Of course, even though his works of art for sale are now inaccessible to many collectors, each of his exhibitions is an event. The current exhibition at London's Courtauld Gallery, an art museum in the centre of the city on the Strand, houses the art collection of the Courtauld Institute, an independent teaching and research institution of the University of London specialising in the study of art history. A dozen paintings by Peter Doig are on show until 29 May, most of them previously unseen, as well as eighteen prints inspired by his friend the poet Derek Walcott.

"The Courtauld Gallery is the perfect place to see Doig's work, as our collection of impressionist and post-impressionist art remains a source of inspiration for his pictorial imagination," says the exhibition's curator, Stefan Whrigt. Daumier, Courbet, Gauguin, Matisse... but also the American artists of the Depression, those of the Ash Can School group or regionalist painters: references to art history are indeed omnipresent in Peter Doig's paintings.

Visuels :
- Peter Doig, Alpinist, 2022, Pigment sur lin, 295cm x 195cm © Peter Doig, Tous droits réservés, DACS 2023
- Peter Doig, Swamped, 1990. CHRISTIE'S