Peter Doig

Images do things, it’s been said, one of which surely is to make us come closer. A great picture beckons, and we are drawn in to its unique cosmology even as the source of its power remains out of reach. In some real way, the image can’t be owned; its meaning migratory, its Realism never quite that.

The invitation, and effects of the image are on my mind, having just seen Peter Doig’s exhibition at the Musée des beaux-arts, and while rereading Michael Taussig’s Mimesis and Alterity (Psychology Press, 1993). With their disarming blend of abstraction and Realism, citational density and mimetic overload, how real is real? Doig’s paintings seem to ask. How real is real when it comes to representation’s relation to life and the effects of paint on embodied optics? Taussig’s interest, meanwhile, is on the tactile effects of mimesis. Distilling key moments in anthropology that contemplate the magical effects of the copy on the original, he asks, “How much of a copy does the copy have to be to have an effect on what it is a copy of? How real does the copy have to be?” For Doig, the relation is as proximal as is colour to sound. For Taussig, the image’s efficacy has as much to do with contact—the visceral force of the image on an animate perceiving body—as with likeness.

The story of copy and contact seems useful—a way to name the artist’s embrace of the familiar and the everyday through mimesis even as technique, scale and colour compel a slow-motion, back-and-forth way of seeing. Doig is working from a vast collection of personal, found and archival photographs, as well as advertisements and film. Repetitions stack up and fall away, marking a desire for an expansive source of iconography outside of personal psychology or lived experience, at the same time pointing to a super contemporary pleasure and anxiety in reproduction. Enter the uncanny.

The central image of Pelican (Stag), 2003, for instance, recurs across several paintings: in each, Doig takes hold of a figure in motion, a man walking on the shore, upright, angular, his face registering only a direct gaze, challenging and inscrutable. In this image an expansive, darkened jungle threatens to overtake his body, set off on canvas against a flood of sky blue paint that drips downward. Here, the ground disappears, and he is adrift on a blue-black void; overhead, palm leaves swing rhythmically in green, white and indigo. The image feels real, vivid and familiar, until the paint itself, in thin wash and streaked colour, makes you stop. Look again, and you catch yourself remaking the image through expectation, memory and the motion of a head turning.

Effects like these recur in many of the 60 or so paintings, drawings, prints and film posters gathered here by curator Stéphane Aquin, in what I take to be a sharply drawn thesis of Euro-man descending. Whereas 100 Years Ago, 2002, usefully revisits the techniques of modernist painting (the accompanying catalogue draws comparison to figures like Munch and Newman), Doig again paints a solitary figure who stares out at us, adrift in a red canoe, no paddle in sight. But the figure, a man, is awkwardly a man: his arms no more than paint on a canvas, an orange sock-of-a-shape here, a thin black line there. Nor is the canoe nearly a canoe; instead, a horizontal crimson stroke seems to activate some interior archive of “canoe-ness.” As if through haze, the shimmer of refracted light, the man looks out at us, his hair and mustache more like Gregg Allman than Baudelaire, his expression blank and dreadful.

It’s one of several images showing men adrift in water, works that convey loss more than reverie. For example, Figures in Red Boat, 2005–7, depicts six pale figures seated in a boat. They are passive, on a blood-red boat that loses shape, paint pouring downwards, even as the surrounding landscape is schematic at best, rendered large and malleable in tones of putty and eggshell. It’s a bleached-out fade of an image, the grain of the canvas discernable, a few green palms bursting overhead. Nearby, in a reverse mirror effect, Red Boat (Imaginary Boys), 2004, repeats the scene. Here, brown-skinned men sit passively in a more formed boat, set against a tropical landscape that vibrates with vertical rhythms and detail. It’s as if the paintings offer up a psychogeography of encounter and alterity: no single views, only views and projections, marking the colonial project as a failure to see.

But parallel narratives emerge, too, especially in the painter’s affinity for the mundane—walls, sports, sound systems made arresting through repetition and proximity, colour and detail. Ping-Pong, 2006–8, mixes geometric pattern with organic form: foliage creeps over a wall of coloured blocks as a lone player makes contact with the ball, his partner not in sight. The image testifies to the strange drama of the everyday, rendered here through opposition of line, somber grey-blue colour scheme, the intensity of the player’s expression and a ping-pong table standing deep in grass. Maracas, 2002–2008, referring to a beach party near Doig’s home in Trinidad and vaguely reminiscent to me of an Emily Carr, stacks speakers on a beach, as a totem-like figure stands guard on top looking out, mythic in time. But the crimson core of speakers drew my eye inward, while a depthless green background made me step back. The upper canvas shows sharp greens and sea blues, tree and sky in motion, while the lower canvas finds the base speaker seeping brown and red. Gravity is made visible, paint streaks down, and the suggested limits of agency dismantle the sense of reification.

What is so satisfying about these paintings is at once their legibility, and their resistance to reading. As coherent as the exhibition thematically is—its subject modernity itself, with its harnessing of men, land and the act of seeing—the paintings stop short of easy assimilation into meaning. Here, mimesis meets distortion, the familiar belongs to incomplete forms that make us work to see, as if seeing could be knowing, and colour—at once beautiful and by extension threatening—pressures viewing in unexpected ways.

Taussig has much to say about colour, writing about a history of Western “chromophobia” in What Colour is the Sacred? (University of Chicago Press, 2010), that links the phenomenon explicitly to the practice of colonialism. Doig too has a lot to say, inviting us to re-see our relationship to colour through the failures of history and through the destabilizing complements, unlikely surfaces and mnemonic triggers proposed by his palette. Considerable effort, including a website with a video of Doig playing hockey, went into situating him as heroic figure and romantic artist gifted with specialized perception. Instead, his paintings keep drawing us in: to a here-and-now of looking, to a history made animate and then finally, to the colour world. ❚

_“No Foreign Lands” was exhibited at Musée des beaux-arts, Montreal, from January 25 to May 4, 2014. _

MJ Thompson is a writer living in Brooklyn and Montreal. She is an assistant professor in the department of Fine Arts at Concordia University.