Peter Doig, Courtauld Gallery review: An excellent showcase for the most influential painter of his generation

The best works in this eagerly awaited show have a genuinely thought-provoking resonance

‘Alpinist' (Peter Doig)

Peter Doig is everywhere these days. The influence of the Scottish-born, Canadian-raised, 63-year-old British painter, was all over Mixing It Up, the Hayward Gallery’s huge 2021 survey of current British painting.

A whole generation of younger painters have been touched by Doig’s seductive and often slightly sinister fusing of images and references, from Michael Armitage, generally seen as the great future hope of British painting, to Mohammed Sami, currently garnering attention with his show at Camden Arts Centre.

And it’s evident from this exhibition at the stately Courtauld Gallery that Doig himself is still very much around.

Comprising just 12 paintings, most large in scale, and a roomful of etchings, this exhibition was eagerly awaited from the moment it was announced. It makes an excellent showcase of everything that’s impressive, affecting and downright baffling in the enigmatic post-modern symbolism that has made Doig the most influential painter of his generation and, for a time, the world’s most expensive living artist. The paintings here were all completed after Doig’s return to London in 2020, from Trinidad where he had lived since 2002. If Trinidad still feels very present in most of the works, in the form of tropical foliage, dreamlike beach scenes and multiple references to calypso and soca music, with which Doig is clearly obsessed, that’s because most of these paintings were started in Trinidad. For all their sense of disarming casualness – a typical Doig painting contains areas that look barely started let alone finished – they can take up to a decade to complete.

Doig’s paintings bring together references and quotes from art history, his own life, photography, and popular culture, with a vaporous layering of paint that recalls early modern greats such as Munch and Gauguin – but filtered through influences as diverse as post-punk music and trash horror movies. Far from feeling slick, this internalised painterly collage has a hard-won, sometimes gauche quality that demands respect but can be a shade nonplussing.

Indeed, anyone coming cold to his large canvas Night Bathers (2019), one of the first paintings we see on entering the show, might wonder what all the fuss is about.

'Painting on an Island’ (Peter Doig)

A woman lies on a luminous yellow beach – looking a touch awkwardly painted, though that may be deliberate. Her skin shines blue in the light of a massive moon reflected in a band of turquoise that runs across the middle rear of the painting. Despite multiple figurative elements, such as a clunking great shed on the left, it’s hard not to read sky, sea and sand as fields of shimmering colour in the manner of Mark Rothko. The effect is compounded by the presence of a blurry Rothkoesque cloud, while the figure of the woman brings Picasso to mind. Beyond that, and the fact that it’s very pleasant to look at, I wasn’t sure where to go with the painting.

In the imposingly scaled Night Studio (Studiofilm and Racquet Club) (2015) Doig paints himself at work in his Trinidad studio – at night, as is his habit – a big, sloppily dressed figure, in T-shirt and sweatpants, his face a mass of stippled colour. Rather than wielding his paintbrush, he stands in front of one of his paintings, adopting the pose of the figure in the painting, arm raised in what might be some gangster sign. It’s as though he’s performing his art on the stage of his studio.

Figure and surrounding vegetation are captured in loose looping lines that look like they’ve taken all of 10 minutes to execute, while the detailed grid down the left of the painting looks abstract, but represents a racquets court, a sport Doig much enjoys.

While Doig’s paintings invariably invoke specific places – particular beaches, a Swiss ski slope, a London canalside – he claims not to be interested in “real spaces, only in painted spaces”, and that “there is never any specific time or place in my work”. Having hit on his core image, he seems to approach it in the manner of an abstract painter, allowing colour, line and form to take their own course. While Doig has been credited with giving new life to figurative painting, it’s the tension between storytelling and abstraction that makes his art compelling.

‘Night Studio' (Peter Doig)

In Alice at Boscoe’s (2023), for example, his daughter lies in a hammock surrounded by a mesh of dense tropical leaves, but it’s impossible not to interpret the tiled wall and floor forming the background, all in deep maroons, oranges and browns, as a piece of hard-edge abstract painting.

The 10-foot-high Alpinist (2022) is classic A-grade Doig with its initial “WTF?” quality, as a snow-goggled Harlequin figure walks up an alpine slope, with the massive glittering spike of the Matterhorn rearing dramatically through the background. The image was taken from an old postcard to which Doig added the hilariously incongruous Harlequin, a figure regarded in folklore, and particularly in the early 20th-century art that Doig greatly admires, as a creatively-fertile trickster character. His criss-cross skis may have religious connotations, the wall text suggests. But having been drawn in by the sheer oddness of the image we soon find ourselves absorbed in the beauty of the painted surface with its layers of thinly applied paint washing and dripping over each other, with some areas barely touched by the brush. These include the top of Harlequin’s head which has the word Willow lightly written across it in charcoal. I wouldn’t bother even starting to wonder what that’s about.

I came to this exhibition expecting just more of Doig’s now long-established signature shtick, and that, in a sense, is what we get. Yet I came away with my respect for Doig renewed. It’s in the nature of what he does that not all his paintings will be equally successful. But when one of his images hits the spot it has a genuinely thought-provoking resonance; the sense you get with genuinely great art that the work cannot be entirely unpacked and reduced to a single, easily comprehensible description.

Courtauld Gallery, until 29 May