Peter Doig has long been in pursuit of an approach that both upholds and develops the conventions of traditional painting – using it as a vehicle for a mysterious inner world, one nourished by the wild imaginaries of different geographies. This stylistic sensibility, enriched by references to the dynamic, intense and expressionist realities of the 1980s, does not hesitate to turn toward a symbolic, and at times obscurely shadowed, figuration. A dimensionality that seems bound to historical events and local narratives leans directly on cultural difference, on a displaced, primordial and authentic mode of expression. For stories rendered as desolate scenes, it constructs an uncanny ground through strange and unlikely connections. What emerges, then, is a language and register that is at once inward and occasionally exuberant, tragic and ironic in equal measure. Precisely as in his 2025 London exhibition, House of Music.

an installation built on the connections between memory, sound and imagination

In this exhibition, Doig creates a singular spatial arrangement around a vintage sound system, an original Western Electric / Bell Labs apparatus. This practice, which brings the viewer into a new interior environment where music and painting converge, continues to reflect the cultural traces of the life he led in Trinidad between 2002 and 2021, while simultaneously envisioning a distinct visual and auditory experience. As if carried by an estranging affect, following the thread of a different story of existence, the artist brings traditional culture into dialogue with contradictory psychological meanings that intensify the stylistic quality of visual expression.

The works in House of Music, integrated with sound, consist of paintings that are powerful and visible in their reinforcement of spatial and environmental evocation. Two large speakers, used in the cinema and film industry of the 1930s and capable of producing tremendous sound, are incorporated into the exhibition context with considerable technical mastery. These monumental devices, calm in their silence, become, in Jonathan Jones’s words, mystical objects heralding both creation and destruction. An opportunity is seized to add new dimensions, through the idea of installation, into the connective tissue of sound, memory and imagination. A shared listening space is sought, something resembling a domestic environment, a place for contemplation and dialogue. In this way, the musical world opened by the paintings invites us into an anxious, primitivism-adjacent naturalness of a serene and spiritual illusion. The hallucinatory mode of animation, which ages and blurs the image within this context, preserves the unsettling sense of exterior and remote space.

In sum, through this vision, Doig situates local figurative characters within a particular psychogeography, narrating cultural references within a framework of established belief and symbolic, conceptual structure. In this exhibition, for instance, the lion positioned across the canvases is made to wander through its own uncanny territory, bound by transcendent meanings and connections to memory and history. The image is drawn into metaphors of music and festivity, while simultaneously descending into the search for freedom and the colonial past. Finding an aperture within the cultural history of a particular geography, Doig reinterprets the lion figure as a symbol not only of power and dominion, but of an enduring search for hope.

a spatial dimension shaped by fantastic and dystopian connections

House of Music is, in essence, a space designed to make heard voices shaped by sensitivity and responsiveness within a sound and image-driven environment. It attempts to interpret Doig’s painting practice within a system connected, almost organically, to the act of generating auditory sensation. For the possibility is considerable that the sound sought and described here is a matter of a spatial dimension with fantastic and dystopian connections. At the same time, this arrangement, which appears in some measure mysterious and unnerving in the absence of sonic support, effectively dystopicanizes the environment, rendering it a powerful source of dread that destabilizes the real.

And yet House of Music may, in any case, be understood as a contribution to the continuity of Doig’s painting and thematic practice. Though it appears to deviate somewhat from his path in pursuit of adding a new visual dimension and intellectual space to his paintings, he is clearly seeking to reach more powerful emotional responses. Through different references sensed in the presence of music, he designs a complete void-space that reconstructs meaning on its own terms. It is for this reason that the exhibition atmosphere, touched with rare delicacy, presents itself as a subtler and more deeply layered stage for local, historical and cultural articulation.