Notes on the Doig exhibition, Feb 2023, Courtauld
Doig turns commonplace scenes into sublime moments.
He narrates with a lexicon of registers:
- The turpsy bleed
- The seductive hair pining line
- The turps less dry mark
- The thick scrape of paint off the palette knife
- Sharp edges
- Transluscent washes
- Unquestioning serpentine line
- Among others
It’s this constellation of facture and register which emits meaning and feeling
The subject matter is a way to access this way of making
Doig’s subject matter is to do with place and time
Doig paints place
Specifically a kind of home sickness / lessness
He began this painting in Zermat*
Finished it in London
He lived in Trinidad
Now in London
This traversing of place leads to something consonant in his practice
He paints in a way, the feeling of being in London, dreaming of Trinidad
It is the search for something different
It is the longing for presence from a place of absence
It is lack
It is day dreaming
It is projectring
And eliciting the psychedelic and imaginative from the mundane
If you look at the figures doig paints, they are not present, there is dissonance between the figure and their environment
These figures physically are in these landscapes, but psychologically somewhere else
He shows this by showing his figures
staring out of the canvas
anonymised abstracted expressions
barriered by goggles
lying on the beach at night, floating, with no shadow underneath them,
amputated from their environment
temporally confused
When it comes to time he is clever
He employs the history of art in a way that turns it from a burden into a voice.
It is a way for him to speak to previous moments in tine
In the same way he does with space
The Harlequin was painted by
Miro
Picasso
Chagall
Kandinsky
Klee
De Chirico
And speaks to figures such as van gogh
The outcast, the character who does not have a place and space in society
Who makes no sense
Who lives by alternate logics and systems of value
If we think of the Harlequin as a body dis-integrated from the rest, the whole, from belonging we see a congruence with doig on a phenomenological level, an artist who’s identity is scrambled, living in Scotland, Canada, London, Dusseldorf, Trinidad and London, as well as Switzerland. Like this, his paintings are concerned with becoming and potentiality as opposed to fixed identity, which is inherently the spirit of a progressive disposition.
In another work, he riffs off Cezanne’s Bathers, it shows a strong figure, particularly uncomfortable in body language, and something is clearly missing, they seem lonely and longing, they seem totally keyed in, yet with a heart on mute, nothing can escape, there is nothing outside the frame.
Doig’s works jump gears on the level of facture, emotion, presence, absence, motion, suspension, and time, yet everything is still.
The way I would describe doigs practice is like this:
A head amputated from a body and
thrown over the edge of the ship,
warping from the waves
jettisoned on loop, pulled around by the moons force
in chaos
last thing, it is a great pleasure to see these paintings adjacent to the Courtauld’s collection of paintings. I think the work ‘pairs nicely’ with Toulouse-Lautrec, The Bathers at Asnieres (NationalG) and the fake Manet at the top of the stairs.
A rare example of good painting today, definitely worth seeing.