Sound and vision: artists take to the decks for Peter Doig's Serpentine show

"Peter Doig's Maracas (2002-08) may look at first like a Caribbean landscape invaded by Modernist abstraction. Beneath a blue sky, with green hills behind and surrounded by palm trees, rises a stack of progressively smaller rectangles dominated by those quintessential Constructivist colours-black, white and red. But then there is a figure, in Naples yellow, who appears to stand on the bottom rectangle. What might initially have seemed to be a painterly exercise in the collision of nature and abstraction is in fact a memory:"

"In one of his travels around the island, he visited Maracas Bay, a bathing spot close to the Trinidad capital, Port of Spain. At one end of the beach he saw a sound system-a stack of speakers-on which stood a man in a yellow suit. He first translated this recollection into a drawing for a poster for StudioFilmClub, the cinema night that he ran with fellow artist Che Lovelace in Trinidad, and eventually it became the subject of this nearly three-metre-tall painting."

"Maracas is one of numerous canvases made since the turn of the millennium that feature in House of Music, Doig's exhibition at Serpentine South. But what sets this apart from Doig's previous museum shows in the UK-at Tate Britain in 2008, National Galleries of Scotland in 2013, and the Courtauld Gallery in 2023-is that sound systems are as central to the presentation as paintings."

Maracas presents a Caribbean scene of blue sky, green hills and palm trees interrupted by a stack of Constructivist-coloured rectangles topped by a Naples-yellow figure. The image originates from a remembered moment at Maracas Bay near Port of Spain when a man in a yellow suit stood on a stack of speakers. The recollection evolved into a drawing for a StudioFilmClub poster and then into a nearly three-metre painting. House of Music at Serpentine South gathers canvases made since 2000 and gives equal prominence to sound systems alongside the paintings themselves.

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