Luxury paint

From Saatchi's 2005 exhibition The Triumph of Painting to the Hayward's Painting of Modern Life last autumn and Tate Britain's current retrospective, Peter Doig's work illustrates the value of contemporary painting.

Last year, Charles Saatchi sold Doig's White Canoe for £5.7 million, making it the priciest work by a living European painter.

Today's super-rich, at least in the West, aren't reinvesting their massive wealth in productive capacity. Rather, they're shopping. For yachts, a mansion on every continent and contemporary art.

Although Doig didn't see a penny of the sum that he says turned his stomach, this is good news for artists. The market's still booming, despite headlines last September such as "Art world braced for crash." But is it good news for art?

Despite Damien Hirst's diamond-studded skull, it's not the infinite variety of conceptual art that has lately fit the square peg of modern art into that roundest of round holes, the aesthetic sensibilities of the bourgeoisie.

No, it's painting. A painting can be hung on a wall and is usually the result of individualised production. It's the medium in which the friction between the artist and his/her patron that began in the late 19th century with the modernist movement is mostly clearly dissipating.

Art critic JJ Charlesworth declares that the avant garde is dead, naming restructured capitalism with its weakened industrial working class as the culprit. Saatchi has been patron to both neoliberalism and artists.

Which is why Doig's paintings are interesting. Mainly landscapes, mainly oil on canvas, many push figurative representation - he uses photo images a lot - to the edge of abstraction. That is, to the edge of the easily narrated and the easily recognisable. They, thus arouse curiosity. But do they disturb? Do they push reality off kilter?

In Jetty (1994), a figure on a jetty and a stationary canoe lying in the water are outlined at the bottom of the canvas, realistic and recognisable.

A kind of pointillist technique scatters them with dashes of green, turquoise and red paint.

Then, above and on each side, the water becomes consumed by the paint itself, by larger dots and blobs of black and dark brown that take up the foreground and make the viewer peer into the picture until, finally, congealing at the top of the canvas, the dark green sky morphs into a psychedelic pattern a bit like a still from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. A trippy light show but in negative.

Other paintings bring the background to the fore even more. Concrete Cabin 11 (1992) uses video stills of an abandoned Le Corbusier building in a wood in France.

Tree trunks veil the building's bright white 1960s symmetry, blocks of cherry red and lime green still vivid.

But where the light's coming from and what it lights up are both ambiguous. Some of the tree trunks carry splashes of white paint, suggesting that the light's coming from the foreground, but the white building focuses the viewer's attention again and again. Its size, its concrete mass, seems to spill off either side of the canvas.

And Pond Life (1993) also shifts focus in strange directions. Shadowy skaters stand on a frozen pond in front of a brightly coloured house. The figures are obscured by the brilliance of the house's icy reflection, but even more by the swishing curves that the skates' blades have cut in the ice. Cabin Essence (1993-94), the Le Corbusier block again, has a drowned, underwater feel, the viewer's eye drawn to lily pad-shaped leaves on tree trunks transformed into seaweed.

But, in the end, Doig's work is just that little bit too stationary. His take on the world, his way of seeing and shifting our way of seeing, the stamp of his art, is missing.

But his colours are gorgeous, especially the blues and greens that he's using since he moved back to Trinidad, where he lived from ages one to seven. His painting technique is fascinating. His landscapes, both snowy and tropical, are expansive enough to put human figures firmly inside nature.

It's at this point, however, that the stationary begins to look like the unchanging, rather than the momentarily framed and the up-for-examination.

Snow, swamps, marooned canoes, languid tropical lagoons, becalmed islands, obsolescent buildings, reflections in water and ice by definition static, all add up to a kind of lethargy, an unwillingness to push too far the contradictions that animate his work.

It can't be technical naivety that gives his current work its unfinished tentative feel. He's a prize-winning artist, now famously applying his oils more thinly.

It's as though, having become a landowner in the Caribbean, in the Third World, he hasn't found a stance and doesn't know what his relationship to his new environment is. Not surprisingly, his portraits don't work.

Trinidad is famous as a racial melting pot, of which Carnival is one expression. It's also the birthplace of many radical black intellectuals. Not one of the figures in Doig's current work appears to be non-European.

Where is Doig in all this? Is he marooned in his canoe, in an artistic lagoon, stuck in a swamp of super-rich patronage?

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