Magic moments, magic realism

There's doubtless some nifty critical category into which Peter Doig's work can be squeezed - Magic Realism being the most likely. And, yes, some of Doig's new paintings, on show at the Victoria Miro Gallery, do have a vaguely Magic Realist feel to them. Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre, for example, features a pair of moustached men in Student Prince outfits standing at the gate of a road that curves languidly to nowhere.

Upstairs, 100 Years Ago (Carrerra) stars a Coleridge-ish-looking mariner at sea in an orange canoe, while several other pictures (Pinto, Gran Riviére) feature white horses, girls trapped in thorn thickets and other stock figures from the Freudian dream repertoire.

But Doig's new work is doing something much more sophisticated than taking a handy leap on to the Magic Realist bandwagon. If the horses and burgomasters of his paintings happen to pop up in the dreambooks of Dr Freud, they also have a more personal resonance for Doig himself. For the Scottish-born, Canadian-and-West-Indian-raised artist, travel has been a way of life. As with de Chirico's enigmatic arrivals, his work suggests the way that memory and movement can become one and the same thing.

These new pictures - beach scenes, Berlin streets, boys walking on frozen ponds - use travel through space as a way of travelling through time. Doig, if you like, is a tourist of the memory, his hazy, half-forgotten-looking pictures tinged with the air of old snapshots. They're not easy to make, though. The scuffed, washed and glaze-spattered surfaces of his canvases tell their own story; carry their own memories, like Doig himself.

Until May 22, Victoria Miro Gallery, 16 Wharf Road N1, Tue to Sat 10am to 6pm, free.
Tel: 020 7336 8109
Tube: Old Street