Be Afraid

My heart beats like a Swedish masseur’s fists inside my ribcage, and my palms begin to itch and sweat. I crane my neck so I can make out what’s in the tree. It’s nighttime, and the image of the girl in white is suspended like a moon against the red bark of a leafless tree and the black sky. Am I in a darkened movie theater watching the latest regurgitation of alien invasion or demonic possession? No, I’m viewing the work of contemporary painter Peter Doig–online, late at night. In a dark room. I get up to make sure the front door is locked. And then I check all of the windows. Just in case.

To say the artist’s images are horror movie-esque would minimize their impact, considering the drivel Hollywood has delivered lately in the way of thrillers. Scary old house? Come on. Been there, done that. The world is ending, you say? Again? The Dallas Museum of Art’s Charles Wylie says of his work, which the museum displays as Peter Doig: Works on Paper, “Some have made comparisons to the horror movie genre simply because of the conventions he uses such as the lone figure or the voyeuristic perspective from trees or underbrush. But the effect of the work is more open-ended and thus mysterious. Where are these people? What are they doing there?” And then there is the visceral beauty of the work. The often solitary figures placed in ethereal, dream-like landscapes–or “no-where places,” as the artist calls them–are as lovely as they are haunting.

In the muddied waters of our new post-post-modern art world of manic fads being replaced by voguish movement after movement ad infinitum, Doig’s Impressionist and impasto style using traditional materials–everything from charcoal, oil paint, acrylic, ink, to crayons on paper and canvas–is reminiscent of those symbolist and surreal masters from the early 20th century: Matisse, Hopper and Munch. But the resemblance stops at the choice of materials and subject matter: an arcane cast of characters, placid lakes, vivid seashores and lush forest scenes. While, as Wylie says, “Peter Doig has been credited in part with a revival of the Romantic spirit in painting,” the uncanny effect of his work is something altogether new–a powerful style of painting that may interest even the DVD generation and perhaps is, in part, a product of it.