A giant sound system towers against green mountains in Peter Doig’s painting Maracas, while a tiny man stands on a speaker-stack to reveal the monstrous scale. It’s a utopian – or dystopian – daydream of what sound can be. Could the speakers broadcast enough sonic power, enough soul and love, to blast away reality? They are silent, of course; the mystery, the dread, lies in the expectancy.
Not any longer. House of Music, Peter Doig’s new exhibition, or club, or festival, turns this painting hanging in the Serpentine’s vestibule-like introductory space into a manifesto, and turns up the volume.
Doig’s eerie paintings are set to a soundtrack of music selected from his personal collection of vinyl and played through immense speakers, salvaged from old cinemas by his collaborator Laurence Passera. These archaeological objects are sculptures in themselves, with gaping mouths of wood and metal that once boomed behind the screens of British picture houses and auditoriums in the golden age of cinema-going. One Western Electric/Bell Labs speaker system was made in the late 1920s and early 1930s, at the very advent of films with synchronised sound. Your body and head will be filled with Aretha Franklin, Kraftwerk, Black Truth Rhythm Band, Neil Young and the painter’s other favourites – if it works, that is.
Lion in the Road, 2015. Photograph: © Peter Doig. All Rights Reserved
When I visited early, the speakers were silent; Passera climbing about in a chaos of wires and circuits, finalising the setup, as if preparing for some legendary music festival – the night before Woodstock, the day before Altamont. The eve of creation or destruction. Doig remained unflappable.
At least I could concentrate on the paintings in peace. It may get rowdy when it opens. There will be dancing and sweat. Tables and chairs of hewn wood and recliners are scattered through the gallery’s variously lit rooms, adding to the invitation to enjoy this as a club. Yet it’s all a natural extension of the vibes you get from Doig’s art. The moment you enter you are cocooned in his misty musical dreams. An old musician plucks a guitar. Where are we? No place and every place, a fantastical realm of art. For all the affinity with pop culture, there’s something of the 1890s about Doig’s art. He channels the stilled landscapes of the French muralist Puvis de Chavannes and the Tahitian forests of Gauguin. There are naked women in the woods, or on rollerskates. They seem to me more spiritual than carnal. In one painting, a masked woman is apparently tied to a tree like Saint Sebastian as dark blue nudes move around her in a melting red and green forest. It’s the crazed dream you might have after worrying all day about the politics of “primitivism” in modern art.
What is he saying? Who cares? Figurative details dissolve before your eyes in heady washes and drunken cascades of painterly texture, flowing over canvas, or linen, or sometimes vellum. At the start, a wall of flags greets you; but soft edges, blurred boundaries and hazy strokes turn these symbols into ghostly echoes. Above them are two tiny, tropical islands in a still blue sea, their dark silhouettes pulsing, shimmering, flickering.
Maracas, 2002–08. Photograph: Peter Doig
Every solid object sinks into the ocean of colours. The painting that draws me back most is Music of the Future, a more than three-metre wide vision of a lakeside party venue at night. People and lights, clubhouses and umbrellas are scattered along the shore, its deeply shadowed water reflecting the night above. The creation of atmosphere through ultra-fine yet never prissy gradations of colour is utterly captivating: the night is not black but an infinitely various mix of green and purple, in paint that still seems wet even though this work was made in the early years of the 21st century.
One work genuinely is practically wet – Doig was adding touches on Monday before art handlers arrived to tear it from his studio, he tells me. A lion stands in solitary fury in a yellow courtyard next to a jailhouse. Blood soaks its shaggy mane but it remains unbowed. Beyond columns with statues on top, across a brown wasteland under a red sky as hollow and disturbing as a Dalí desert, stand the ruins of a bombed city.
Doig’s art seems to take you to an ethereal dream space, off the map and out of the history books, but the news from nowhere turns out to be full of urgency. This painting is one of three history-scale canvases starring the Lion of Judah that hang in the centre of the show, with the oldest speakers. In the first he painted, a spectral man stumbles past a yellow and green prison house while the lion stands in regal defiance. It inspired a poem by Nobel prizewinner Derek Walcott. Last year, Doig painted Lions (Ghost) – two lions half-playing, half-slumbering under a mossy arch before a pink, seaside scene (Collioure, where Matisse invented Fauvism).
Just as I start to think it’s all got a clear moral message, Doig explains that it was inspired by a trip to Valletta, Malta to see Caravaggio’s Beheading of John the Baptist. Now I see that it reproduces the architecture of this unforgettable painting, and that there’s a tiny sketch of the executioner getting out his knife to cut the last bit of skin of John’s neck.
It’s a cover version. Doig’s sonic enterprise teaches that the language of painting is not remote or difficult, but as enjoyable as music. Artists remix other artists, and in his case, can paint images that get into your head as enigmatically and irremovably as a song. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that lakeside nocturne or fathom it. Play it again.
Peter Doig: House of Music is at Serpentine South Gallery, London, 10 October-8 February
