The rapid ascendancy of Peter Doig has seemed to run counter to all the main trends in contemporary art. The general consensus in the last decade of the 20th century was that painting was finished, a hopeless anachronism in the age of virtual reality and sliced cows. Those who did paint tended towards a deliberately bland formalism, producing works that were the artistic equivalent of whistling in the dark. In this climate of so-called "endgame painting" (the analogy being with the unresolvable impasse sometimes reached in games of chess), Doig was yet more of a Luddite. For a start, he persisted in using oil paint and canvas as opposed to the slick banality of household gloss and aluminium panels. Furthermore, his pictures weren't merely high-sheen designer objects (as, say, Damien Hirst's mass- produced spot paintings), but attempted to conjure a world beyond themselves. Doig, in other words, was that least fashionable of creatures: a landscape painter.
By the time of "Blizzard seventy-seven", his major solo show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1998, the peculiar quality of Doig's landscapes had become clear. His large, ghostly canvases seemed as much informed by memories of his Canadian adolescence (horror films, skiing, hallucinogens) as by direct experience of nature; the prevailing mood was one of sickly foreboding. A few basic subjects or themes repeated themselves - lakes or swamps in which skies or human figures are reflected, buildings seemingly pierced or riddled with delicate tree branches. One painting - Pond Life (1993) - fused these two obsessions, the reflection of a house in a frozen lake scored through with the fine white arcs left by ice-skaters. But the most memorable feature of Doig's pictures was the milky residue on their surfaces that evoked the mottled paleness of the Milky Way. Even Doig's daylight scenes - Daytime Astronomy was the particularly apt title given to one of them - seemed saturated with stars.
Another unusual feature of his work was its relation to photography. While other painters slavishly sought to reproduce its effects (a photorealism made no less dull by a vogue for mimicking not pin-sharp but blurred pictures), for Doig, it was never more than a point of departure. That his compositions were frequently based on holiday snaps or postcards could be guessed from their bland, unimaginative structure. What made them interesting was the way these sources had been transfigured in being turned into paintings, Doig's corroded-looking surfaces and unearthly colours lending the fabric of everyday life a supernatural brilliance.
Trees and figures frequently seemed to have been painted using stencils or silhouettes, giving them the insubstantial appearance of ghosts or objects caught in the dissolving blast of a nuclear explosion. The resultant look was a kind of spectral ordinariness, an apocalyptic death-glow that might either be real (nuclear holocaust, industrial disaster) or imagined (too many magic mushrooms). Doig's materials may have been primitive, but his concerns were as contemporary as anyone's.
The new work, a selection of which is currently showing at the Victoria Miro Gallery, does not depart significantly from his earlier concerns. The two shows are linked by the inclusion of Milky Way (1989-90), a strangely gauche picture of trees and stars reflected in a lake that seems to be something of a talisman for Doig (its clumsiness hints at why in future he would prefer to find his compositions ready-made). That lone canoeist in the centre of the lake - an image taken from the notorious dream sequence in the film Friday the 13th - is repeated in 100 Years Ago (2001), the painting that gives the exhibition its title. Here, however, the boat dominates the scene, its slender form dividing the lowest band of cloudy aquamarine from the pale-blue middle one. Above the horizon, where an island perches like a livid green stain, is a third band of glistening, torrential, midday blueness. Doig may be strictly a figurative painter, but here he seems to be gravitating towards the monumental plainness of abstract art. Grand Riviere (2001-2002) exudes a similar atmosphere of tropical torridness, the canvas mottled and stained with festering greens. But it is the picture that is most closely related to the earlier work - Untitled (2001-2002), another of those waxen snow scenes - that sticks in the memory. At his best, Doig makes the lilac glow of the northern hemisphere far more alluring than any equatorial hot spot.
"Peter Doig: 100 years ago" is at the Victoria Miro Gallery, 16 Wharf Road, London N1 (020 7336 8109) until 6 June
Ned Denny is the New Statesman art critic
