MICHAEL ARMITAGE

In images that are both sublime and tragic, Armitage deals with the complexities of contemporary life in his native Kenya. Weaving narratives drawn from literature, film, politics, history and myth, he captures the dramas of the everyday set within the verdant expanse of the East African landscape, while imbuing the whole with a fragile sense of mortality.

Armitage paints with oil on Lubugo, a cloth made from fig tree bark from Uganda that is traditionally used in ceremonial burial rituals. His choice of ground is resonant: an attempt, he has remarked, to both locate and destabilise the subjects of his paintings. Beaten, stretched taut and then sewn together, Lubugo has a characterful, natural tactility with pitting, texture and holes that offer a resistance to paint. Working with this fertile ground, the resulting surface and support work together as integral components of the pictorial space.

As with much of the artist’s practice, the subjects for these new paintings are drawn from a wide range of sources, reimagined with a sensibility that might be likened to magic realism. Whether painted outdoors in Kenya or in Armitage’s London studio, his landscape vistas collide timescales – compressing past and present, the real or imagined. Multiple viewpoints, superimpositions of outlines and figures, saturated and vaporous swathes of vivid colour and passages of translucent wash create a dense pictorial language in which materiality and form effortlessly meld, where subject and subtext have equal status and thematic power.

Armitage uses landscape to powerful effect in many of these paintings. Account of an Illiterate Man (2020), inspired by a patch of virgin forest near the artist’s family home, shows a dark mass of indigenous vines and creepers, some of which are known to possess medicinal properties. This thicket of vegetation with its potential healing properties represents a hidden culture of knowledge: a wisdom and understanding not associated with literacy but with a waning oral tradition. Similar natural forms populate Cave (2021), a painting in which we look down into a chromatic, rainbow coloured embryonic sac enclosing a head and body, seemingly blown into shape through a valve by a man and a woman. Both works are characterised by imagery that retain a translucence, nothing appears grounded, their form seemingly fixed only by the luminous intensity of the colour palette.