Member-only story
Corrosion And Other Maladies In Peter Doig’s Latest, Paintings
Paintings, at Michael Werner Gallery, London (16 November)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones
With Peter Doig — who has a collection of new paintings on show at the Michael Werner Gallery, London — corrosion is paramount. His paintings seek to overturn themselves from within, alluding to altered states, to dreams and hallucinations. His paint has become increasingly loose, curdled, and his lurid colour palette is intentionally sour. This is a vinegary type of beauty.
Doig is a painter who embraces accidents and chance encounters. “I always try to escape my mannerisms,” he said once. An artist from the Gerhard-Richter-school of found-imagery, using newspaper cuttings and film stills, Doig has drawn from such sources as Friday the 13th and Japanese ski brochures as the basis for his paintings. Yet so reworked are his sources that the originals become suppressed in a vision that skates a fine line between figuration and abstraction. The result is a murky narrative rooted in ambivalence. The human points of contact — solitary figures on glowing shorelines, sunbathers, lone divers — are carried over between paintings, so that recurring figures have the potential to undo one another’s meaning — cousins in paint fostering different motives.
