A carnival character, the Trinidadian Blue Devil, emerges from a thicket of palm leaves in Peter Doig’s sumptuously painted, hallucinatory scene, exemplary of a painterly vision that has distinguished Doig as one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. Realised with a characteristically sensual, expressive handling of paint and colour, Untitled draws upon memories of the Trinidad Carnivals and an old photograph of Le Corbusier, balancing at the shadowy overlap between past and present, the actual and imagined.

The present work was painted in 2004, only two years after Doig moved to Port of Spain in Trinidad, where he lives and works today. In Untitled the artist returns to half-remembered scenes from the period of his early childhood spent in Trinidad. Doig attended the carnival as a young child, later recalling the costumed people known as Blue Devils, who rub their skin with blue soap to give it the bright hue depicted in the present work. He explained to the critic Richard Shiff that the long hair and skull mask adorning the Blue Devil in Untitled in fact refer to a figure seen at a recent carnival, after he returned to the island. Illuminated in silvery light, the figure appears as an uncanny, dream-like apparition, layered with images gleaned from old memories.

At this time Peter Doig made several paintings of solitary figures emerging from tropical forests. These compositions are based on a photograph of the modernist architect Le Corbusier stepping through doors adorned with palm fronds at his home on the French Riviera. A decade earlier Doig had painted Corbusier’s monumental residential apartment block at Briey, Northern France, viewing the then derelict structure through the surrounding trees. These paintings, titled Concrete Cabin, distilled a particular interpretation of Sigmund Freud’s unheimlich, the un-homely or uncanny, where the unfamiliar appears strangely familiar and the familiar becomes unknown and unsettled. Richard Shiff notes that Doig recognised a similar uncanny potential in the photograph of Corbusier, “by slight alteration, it would lose its identifiable meaning and re-enter the field of primal signification” (ibid. p. 90). Doig himself explained:

The image reappears in many guises in this body of paintings, here the Blue Devil taking Corbusier’s place. Using one figure to replace another is typical of Doig’s approach, with his tendency to seek out uncanny resemblances and associations between disparate imagery. Doig notes:

Since moving to Trinidad, Doig’s painting has reflected the influence of the immediate art scene and local stylistic notations, notably the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. The present work particularly recalls Lam’s Murmer from 1943, a female figure depicted against a backdrop of angular palm leaves. Its resemblance to the photograph of Corbusier raises another uncanny resonance; the blurring of Lam’s composition with Le Corbusier, the “European man”, and a Trinidadian carnival character perhaps relates to Doig’s comment to Stéphane Aquin: “it’s not something that’s written about much … but I believe that most of my works made in Trinidad question my being there and also why things are the way they are” (Ibid. p. 30). Doig’s fluid handling of these fragments of daily life, of personal and shared memory is mirrored in his remarkable use of paint. The scene is realised in sweeping brushstrokes, broad washes and thick impasto, it revels in the seductive beauty of paint and the startling contrast of the electric blue against dark, earthy tones. “Oil paint has a kind of melting quality really. I love the way that even when it’s dry it’s not really fixed. Or it doesn’t seem to be fixed. The colours continue to meld together, and react with each other. I think maybe painters look at oil paint in a very different way to people who don’t use it. Painters use oil paint kind of as a form of magic or alchemy” (Peter Doig in conversation with Angus Cook: Ibid. p. 193).