Peter Doig’s paintings evoke a journey through time. House of Music, presented at Serpentine South Gallery in 2025, is precisely such an arrangement, one that carries the viewer into a hazy dreamscape accompanied by two monumental speakers once designed for cinema halls. Here, the artist brings his fantastical landscapes together with music played through vintage sound systems, montaging them within the gallery space to conjure what might be called “a magnificent present.” He is clearly intent on interrogating how visual and auditory phenomena might produce a particular kind of positioning within this creative process. (1)

In this respect, House of Music explores new possibilities of sensory experience by projecting an emotional and mnemonic perception of the past onto the paintings, mediated through music emanating from two ancient, sculptural speakers. (2) These colossal objects, resembling time machines, carry with them the psychology and affect of elapsed time, transporting into this space a spirit exalted by the era’s beloved songs. Through cinematographic paintings exhibited alongside music, and by way of a transmission that captures a worn and weathered temporality, the show unites spatial imaginaries – the home, the club, the music hall-  achieving an altogether intoxicating effect. (3)

house of music: a cinematic stage

Indeed, Doig’s paintings, produced predominantly in Trinidad, reveal a vivid, contemporary and meditative spirit inherent to a Primitivist sensibility, embedded within tropical chromatic registers. In these canvases, suffused with a hazy atmosphere, figurative details, surrealist spaces and particularly the lion figures laden with mythological resonance command immediate attention. The lions, rendered in hesitant yet yielding postures, are not so much images of powerful presence as they are responses to the historical developments of the region and to critical interpretations concerned with psychic hegemony within a cultural frame. (4) Thus the lion roaming freely through the streets of Port of Spain does not primarily signify inhabiting its own territory, but rather the overflowing of boundaries, a spilling beyond the space allotted to it in time and place.

The fantastic, extraordinary and intoxicating intensity that consequently emerges transforms the gallery, accompanied by punk, R&B and jazz, into a performance venue without wings or stage, into experience rooms lit by vivid light, and into something resembling a club atmosphere through functional seating and listening arrangements. A temporal journey blurring across new perceptual experiences, memories and dreams seems to accompany the enchanted atmosphere of this installationary arrangement. These monumental object-sculptures, which transport Doig’s complex mnemonic temporalities into the present, are therefore not merely nostalgic devices. They might instead be regarded as magnificent life forms symbolizing a passionate attachment particular to lived spaces. Or they may be defined as objects of awakened perception, as two paradoxical images that liberate a compressed and arrested period, enabling the experience of layered strata of the past. The music they disperse into the surrounding space is already charged with memories that animate elapsed time.

Doig’s essentially synthesizing spirit, composed of music and color, resembles a story in which an exquisite and privileged creative impulse, of the kind observed in Music of the Future where the autobiographical is animated through the rhythm of melodic songs, becomes dominant, or in which the resistance of an aestheticized intellectual sensibility asserts itself. (5) The aura within House of Music is thus the product of a pleasurable deep-field experience that strikes against things and intersects with Doig himself through the medium of powerful paintings. These canvases, produced with quiet sensitivity alongside a complex and conflicted memory, allow him to encounter not only his own past but other surrealist temporalities as well, enabling the creation of a more emotionally charged dimension of present reality. And here music penetrates affective territories, activating mnemonic images and regenerating itself, inducing the sensation of an accelerated past, precisely as in the painting Maracas, where an enormous sound system dominates the entire landscape, the landscape receding behind it. (6) In this cinematic scene where the imaginary confronts the real, the melodic spirit reflected from these imposing objects, which document the iconography of the past, simultaneously presents a topography of violation, a spiritual present in relation to the contemporary moment. Ultimately, House of Music operates as a substantive space of negotiation, one in which deep mnemonic images surfacing between deviation and intoxicating effect are interrogated and brought into contact with critical instants.

a provocative act of remembrance and other things constructed through sound

House of Music, as a large-scale arrangement composed of memory images grounded in the construction of subjective space, may be defined as an enterprise that orchestrates the harmonic relation of a profound spectacle, one in which the real and the imaginary create opacity through a pure and unmediated permeability. For the fantastical paintings, under the influence of music played from the two monumental speakers, generate a mnemonic clustering of time, becoming the precursor to an emotional act of remembrance, or transposing into a shared experiential space the perception of an oneiric atmosphere generated by these iconic objects. The ecstatic field thus elevated becomes simultaneously a healing, parodic depiction of discovered or recollected times. Above all, a provocative act of remembrance, triggered by the encounter of music with painting, along with other things constructed and stratified through sound, are woven together into Doig’s spellbinding depiction. Indeed, it is possible to characterize the fantastic representations integrated with the two monumental speakers, and figures such as Embah wandering through this environment, as instruments of mental representation: forces that transform imagery into an imagistic multiplicity while rendering it endlessly and profoundly poignant. (7)