Peter Doig at Tate Britain
Peter Doig is one of those artists about whom it is always hard to know what to say. His work is not obviously politicised or fashionably conceptual. He's not radically original or even archly referential, and he doesn't much go in for controversy or the grand publicity gesture. Yet last year he became Europe's most expensive living painter when one of his paintings sold for £5.7 million. And, that, ladies and gentlemen, is some serious lucre. So what exactly is it that makes his stuff so expensive? And is it that good? There is currently a major exhibition of his work at Tate Britain: surely there one might find some answers.
There are various recurring themes in Doig's work: vast starry skies, lone figures, cottages, canoes. Often these figurative elements seem to hint at some kind of narrative beyond the depicted scene. But they are never narratives that really engage or enthral the viewer. The canoes in particular (despite the much discussed influence of Friday 13th) don't really seem to symbolise anything important or have any particular significance. They're just there. This is, in part at least, why Doig is so hard to define or locate – intellectually there isn't all that much going on.
But what Doig is an absolute master of is his handling of paint and his combination of colour. His surfaces are incredibly complex and multi-layered. Huge swathes of tone fade into each other, overlap, and intermingle, before mottled washes are layered over the top. The impression is often of a rich dense something ever half-concealed by a foreground of thinly painted veneers and fuzzy splodges. Take 'Window Pane' (1993), for example, with its glittering reflection of some kind of mythic woodland, glimpsed as in a mirror of wispily par-iced lake. Or 'Jetty' (1990) with its strata of marbled gold overlaid with coloured spatterings.
In his best work, there is a curious sense of something odd or amiss: not really unsettling or haunting, as some have declared, just a wee bit peculiar. These richly desolate dreamscapes seem sprinkled over with magic fairy dust, the big Scottish skies above filled with muted fireworks. There is a sense of this folk-tale magic that sweeps across works such as 'Ganthol zur Mieldentalspurse', although, as some have noted, the fancy-dress characters in the foreground might just be a little too much.
One might think then that the less he focuses upon the figurative and the more he gives himself over to the abstract and the painterly the more effective his work would be. And yet, irritatingly, this is not really the case either. His few wholly abstract works seem flat: devoid of emotional charge or focal point: bereft, simply, of magic. It is as if the figurative elements, for all their weaknesses, are what make his painting sing. It is these flaws in the work that lift the artist's skill and give purpose to the paint.
It is partly because his work resists direct interpretation that it is so continually fascinating. But there is also the lingering sensation that there might not actually be anything to interpret. This, evidently, need not be a drawback. £5.7 million certainly suggests so. Words can't paint how Doig can. His best works linger in the soul, teasing, suggesting, withdrawing... Quite what he may be suggesting is unclear, and, quite probably, unimportant.
