Peter Doig is one of the most influential painters of our time. A leading figure in the revival of figurative painting, he has given the 21st century some of its newest icons. His solitary figures, ethereal landscapes, night scenes, and otherworldly use of light probe at century-old modernist questions while suggesting a new visual language suited for the uniqueness of the contemporary experience.
Like his nineteenth and early twentieth century predecessors, Doig draws his inspiration from his everyday life. His subjects come from his immediate world: the view from his studio window, a passerby, scenes from his commute into Port of Spain, his wife, and children. Doig reconstructs these places and moments from memory and snapshots that he has taken with his mobile phone. It is a personal vocation where the artist grapples with how his real-life encounters live within himself. A melancholic pursuit where he asks how time can transform an occurrence, a situation, a moment, into a thing.
For this exhibition, the Musée d’Orsay and Doig have brought together a special group of paintings that were made over the two decades the artist lived in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad. In an adjacent space, he curates and comments on a selection of works from the collection of the Musée d’Orsay that have captivated him.
The distinct selection of Doig’s paintings, hung in one of the museum’s iconic domed rooms, weave traditions of painting into new, strange, and seemingly impossible composites. Presenting the viewer with a kind of mildly agitated, pensive, contemporary form of modernism, where subjects exist in the mysteries that occur in the spaces between the past and the present, the private and the pastoral.
In the two adjoining rooms that overlook the river Seine, Doig has chosen to bring together a dozen works from the collection. With this selection he not only probes his lifelong interest in painting but looks to dismantle the sense that objects and images are fixed or an unchangeable given. Here visitors encounter the tawny color and dream landscapes of a Gauguin (The White Horse); the naivety of a Rousseau (War); and portraits characterized by isolation (Félix Vallotton and Vuillard), separation (Manet’s Berthe Morisot with a Fan), and even disappearance (Seurat’s Young Peasant in Blue), etc. Doig’s objective with this display has been to create a proposal that is dialectical and to show the ways that art can remain open to each moment that it exists in.
A foundational aspect of Doig’s artistic practice has been the way he contemplates the history of painting and the intimate relationships that he has formed with the masters who have preceded him. The Romantic painters, the post-Impressionists, and the proponents of the Colorist movement are all at the heart of the project that he has conceived with and for the Musée d’Orsay. A great admirer of the museum, Peter Doig establishes a dialogue with the works of the collection and the architecture of the former Gare d’Orsay and in doing so, both as an artist and as a curator, he evokes a sense of nearness and transports his viewer to a different world. A suggestion for a new potential.
Doig’s presence at the Musée d’Orsay this Autumn will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in France in 15 years. It will be a special opportunity to introduce or reintroduce Doig’s remarkable artistic practice to the museum’s French and international public through the prism of the Musée d’Orsay’s masterpieces and storied halls.
at Musée d’Orsay, Paris
until January 21, 2024