A covid-era painting that has already been anointed a masterpiece

Michael Armitage finished this extraordinary painting just last year. The picture, “Curfew (Likoni March 27 2020),” is in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It’s big — more than 8 by 11 feet — and the impression it makes from a distance is instant and seductive: those bright primary colors, the rich green and pink, and the big flourish of those serpentine red lines. They almost burst out of the frame with their volatile, reiterated energy.

You note, too, as you get closer, passages of thick, textured oil paint alternating with very thin, diluted passages that behave more like watercolor. The painting is mostly flat, the arrangement of colors decorative. But there is a general sense of place: of land meeting sea, of people and palm trees and, more subtly, a sliver of what I take to be a Coca-Cola sign over on the right.

As you try to figure out what’s going on, you pick up on crowds and mayhem. In the immediate foreground, a man in a pink shirt looks to be in a state of mortal desperation. Something terrible is taking place.

Still, the sense of spatial recession keeps meeting obstacles, jamming our eyes back up against the picture’s surface. A covered pier or boat is painted in reverse perspective, so the form appears bigger in the distance, instead of smaller. Its shape is echoed on the other side of the canvas, and superimposed on both, looming over the scene, is a giant dreamlike action. The outline of a frightening head seems to spew bodies into the sea.

Armitage, who was born in 1984, lives in Nairobi and London. “Curfew” is his response to events that happened in 2020, when, according to MoMA curator Smooth Nzewi, “paramilitary police in the port city of Mombasa, Kenya, tear-gassed and injured dozens of passengers attempting to board a ferry. The victims were trying to meet the curfew imposed by Kenyan authorities to slow the spread of the coronavirus.”

This is a covid painting, in other words. Without editorializing, it touches on the unequal fight between government authorities and ordinary people during a fraught time. The red, serpentine ribbons of paint are whips, cracking the air, intimidating the crowd. At right, the blurred man in camouflage wields his whip over a man who squirms abjectly at his feet, trying to protect his head with his hand. The man in the pink shirt, trying to escape a similar fate, crawls out of the picture toward us.

So it’s a dramatic painting, provocative as much in its beauty as its disturbing, newsworthy subject. Armitage is a real artist. You can feel him trying to imagine his way into the scene even as he’s absorbed in the physical process of building a picture. A lot of decisions seem to have been made on the run. But even before he pulled out his paints, Armitage’s decision to use bark cloth carried all kinds of implications.

Lubugo, as this kind of cloth is called, can be translated as “funeral cloth” or “shroud.” Made from the bark of fig trees, it’s the main cultural product of the Buganda, the largest tribe in Uganda, where it’s used for burying the dead and for ceremonial clothing. But Armitage first saw it in a Nairobi tourist market in 2010. He became fascinated, he said in an interview published on MoMA’s website, by the way “the material lost its original purpose and was turned from this very significant thing into a coaster used to soak up beers in the evening.”

This transformation, he continued, “mimics a lot of ways that culture, as a result of tourism and development, has been changing and devaluing aspects of meaning, almost to the point of parodying former uses.”

So Armitage’s chosen support was not a neutral thing, a “blank canvas.” Lubugo, he said, has “many irregularities and holes and stitching.” Wanting to make this surface more active, he took to rubbing away the paint he had applied.

So, there it is: the magical dance of making and meaning, of beauty and truth. Armitage gets his ideas wherever he can find them: from news reports, world events, his own observations, his imagination, art history. He’s inspired both by avant-garde artists from Europe and American and East African modern artists such as Kenya’s Meek Gichugu and Uganda’s Jak Katarikawe.

“I use anything that makes it a little bit easier to make a painting, anything that helps. I couldn’t say what I’m looking for. The only thing that I can say is, if something moves me, I’ll use it.”