Peter Doig at Michael Werner and Gavin Brown

Peter Schjeldahl February 9, 2009

Frank O’Hara pegged the going look of urbane sex appeal, in 1962, as “a little ‘down,’ a little effortless and helpless.” He could have been forecasting the dominant fashion in painting almost fifty years later, exemplified in the resonant languors of Luc Tuymans and Elizabeth Peyton and positively exalted, to peaks of forthright ambivalence, by Peter Doig. Concurrent shows, at Michael Werner and Gavin Brown, of the Scots-born, Canadian-raised, English-educated Doig, who lives in Trinidad, answer the question “Why paint now?” with eloquent shrugs. His brushy landscapes and dreamlike or, better, half-awake visions of odd personages (notably “Man Dressed as Bat,” in two versions, at Werner) variously recollect Munch, Klimt, Nolde, Matisse, Rothko, and other past masters, in a spirit less of homage than of smart despair. Doig’s is an art up to its nostrils in historical quicksand. His raffish drawing and quite wonderfully seductive color promote this fix as our best available fun: post-everythingness, for the hip heck of it. ♦