…I spoke to that man on the river, even though he refused to say anything. He said he had memories for events that never happened. He wasn’t even real, but I had certainly known him long before we first met each other. I know he wanted me to come closer to see that actually he just a shadow. He was one of those slippery glimpses stuck in amber. I’m glad he tasted so good though. It kind of made that over priced coffee and lost walk around Chelsea worthwhile. It’s slipping; it’s just a browning fruit.  

Criticism is the art of cold, detached, objective analysis. It’s a rather scientific exercise don’t you know. So with a vacuous brain I announce that I thought Peter Doig’s retrospective at Tate Britain to be pretty, well, excellent. He is a painter I had previously, pretentiously, cast off as pretty but shallow-ish. Yet the lie of reproductive prints is revealed when you see his large canvases in the flesh.

Doing was one of the central British artists to actively move away from the uber slick process lead aesthetic painting was moving towards. That overly inward looking for of practise was either looking to kill painting or was celebrating ideals which would inevitably lead to a self mutilation of the practise. Doig moves in a direction which is contemporary in its aesthetic but traditional in that he plays with figures in space to tell stories. His merging of past trends on one canvas is the kind of thing we are told to call post-modern.

Doig’s paintings are not clear, logical or linear narratives. Like all good visual story tellers he does not try and play literature or film making at its own game. Instead they are narratives which are formed from and around the strengths of his practise. They play on stillness, the singular moment in time and position in space, on the flatness of the picture plane and its ability to suggest depth. There is a conscious incompleteness to the stories. It’s as if the props for completion have been stripped away to leave anything more tangible to be tantalisingly elusive. Doig stands like those figures at the gates of some of his paintings. Welcoming us in but blocking our path. They look out with that kind of Maneteque detachment, opening a channel of communication but refusing to communicate.

The exact temporal sequence of events in Doig’s painting is not clear. He doesn’t want it to be. This kind of poetic mystery is paintings create strength. Slippery glimpses into another world. We need not go from A to B like film and literature are designed to. When literature does go for a more mystical and fragmented for of narration it is doing so against its natural desire, I think. Only music has such an innate ability to be so evasive, but music remains so abstract as to never truly succeed in such narrative constructions.

Construction is very much the word for Doig’s images. They are the end product of a multi layered process. He works from memories, photographs, drawings, prints and found images. The works are amalgams of these various parts, assemblages if you like. He montages these together and unites them through plastic structure and the painterly process and surface. Through these formal devices he is able to create a sense of belonging and place from something which is inherently artificial.

Working from photographs puts Doig into a field of contemporary painters all of whom owe a debt to Manet and Bacon. For all these artists it seems there is something unique about photography which they wish to capture but also a necessity to articulate this and convey it through a painterly language. I am not certain what I mean but it feels like a perverse desire to be positioned in a void.

Working from a photograph provides a very different basis to more ‘traditional’ forms of picture making. It is not the construction of abstract elements (line or marks) towards a representational whole. Instead we start with the image and take it on a journey. It’s not a journey which totally detaches said image from its original existence, that’s the role of certain modes of abstraction. Instead it is a case of readjusting the image, of creating a new shadow of reality from a current shadow. Its an analytical manipulation.

This return to figuration is a tendency in many painters of recent times. It is surely a result of the realisation of abstractions myopic chase towards implosion. It is also a realisation that to fully explore the linguistic potential of paint we need a framework to respond to, be it an image, an idea… we need subject matter. It is like the rhymical structure a musician might give himself to direct and extend the experimentation of his melodies. Without such a system we are lost as the supposedly infinite options of a blank canvas paradoxically cause paralysis.

It is certainly clear with Doig that images allow him to extend the language of the medium. Beyond anything it opens up the door for the need, and natural desire, for paint to have multiple references. No longer just paint for its own sake, but for mimetic, emotive, narrative and symbolic purposes. In truth this is what paintings always been about.

Doig’s splatters, sprays, drips, light washes, heavy impasto drags and twists of a hand create makrs which embrace all of these functions. The range of colour supports this; from that deep dark organic green to saturated and acid pink. As a whole there is a kind of romanticism to his use of marks and colours, but they also feel like they exist in the present. This is an instinctive reaction, I can’t fully explain it.

The result of working from photographs presents Doig with problems which result in inventive and captivating results. Consider a number of his figures. Pictorially they often sit in the foreground, the furthest forward of the various elements. Yet they are often the thinnest and furthest layer back. Through an absence there is a presence. Historically it seems call back to Cubism’s formal plays, but harnessed for theatrical ends. Imagine Rachel Whitread but in paint and suggesting narrative rather than making statements. The voided people and objects seem to resonate with an underlying melancholy, metaphors for the paintings as a whole. They tempt us in and give us a sign then deny the reading.

This is directly a result of his manipulation of pre-existing imagery. Rather than constructing and stage onto which we add figures, Doig is starts with a populated stage which he then works away from. As such the figures are not added onto, but can be worked around. They can be created from a negative space left blank as the surrounding is built up. There is a kind of pragmatism in the process which gets us to this poetic outcome.

Such devices are typical of paintings which convey a sense of mystery, often left floating between realms. It seems that the constant focus on the reflective surfaces of rivers and lakes is a kind of metaphor of this.

You need only look at his shimmer reflective surfaces, often rivers. Always these seem to be mimetic and self reflexive. They are a fantastic modern update of the brilliant two fold plays of Monet’s greatest works. That is an incredible complement. Surfaces which offer flatness and depth and an utterly transfixing relationship of mimetic illusion and painterly reality. For both Monet and Doig this offers no contradiction but the chance to create a realm of utter beauty and mystery. The reflective surfaces are, in effect, a visual metaphor of the art of the practise of painting in general.

Doig’s work seems to be about various forms of slippage. Within the construction of parts, the complete whole, are glimmers and glimpses which tease us in. They leave us hovering somewhere between the real and the illusion.

It is through the experience of the images construction that the painrtings seem to create, find or open up the potential for meaning. It seems they are about the flux of life. The flow of the individual through time and space, trying to find sense and makr or of our position within this ‘mortal coil’. The sense of melancholy, the uncertainty, the mystery and unknown all convey a poignant truth of the present state of the human condition. The search for meaning and reason continues but the answers remain elusive.