For his first major solo exhibition, the British-Kenyan painter Michael Armitage has delved far into the past to create some of his most strikingly contemporary work to date. One of the exhibition’s key pieces, a bold, vividly colourful yet macabre painting, shares its title with Titan’s The Flaying of Marsyas, which ranks among the most famous depictions of the Greek myth. As the myth holds, the satyr of the title befell this gruesome fate by boasting too loudly about his musical talents and, rather ill-advisedly, challenging the god Apollo. Titian’s painting captures the glee that results from punishing those who disrespect the law, its focal point is the motionless body of Marsyas surrounded by a greed-ridden group of creatures. Each leans close to the body to get the chance to peel away an inch skin, gorging themselves on the one who dared to dissent. Michael Armitage’s Flaying of Marsyas builds on Titian’s depiction of this mythical scene. He takes the composition of the original as a template: in the centreground is a figure hung from a tree, surrounded by men pointing their blades at him. However, the main character of the piece is unknown. Armitage shows the sacrifice of an innocent African man, someone who had done nothing to deserve such brutal punishment.
The Chapel, Armitage’s newest exhibition on show at the South London Gallery, features compositions that are just as complex as Titan’s masterpieces. He grants weight to certain motifs, which reveal themselves only under careful scrutiny. But whereas Titian’s compositions contain visual cues that respond to the trends of his era, Armitage’s pieces do not belong to any tradition. He assembles an eccentric visual language from found materials, scraps and fragments he comes across during his laborious research process. He appropriates the signature style of the masters of art history in order to address problems rooted in racism, discrimination and oppression. But his works do not dissect problems in a direct manner. Looking at them would not allow viewers to gain a factual understanding of the devastating effects colonialism on east African culture. His works do not compare to the Black Art movement of the 1970s, to the work of David Hammons, Lorna Simpson or Glenn Ligon. Armitage’s works are influenced by political developments only implicitly. Instead of representing acts of injustice, they recreate the experience of being forced to witness injustice.
For instance, Exorcism revolves around a Tanzanian ritual, during which female members of the community gather together so that the shamans can purge their souls. The painting depicts stretched-out, inanimate bodies, some left lying on the ground, some carried around by the mighty and powerful-looking shamans. Colourful scarves are thrown away, left behind to float in the wind. The women appear alarmingly passive as if they were entirely unguarded and exposed to the will of the priests. There is nothing jovial or vigorous about the piece, unlike the two sources of inspiration from which Armitage draws from. The arrangement of the motifs, the bodies, the position they take up in the landscape and the perspective from which the whole scene is shown takes after the work of the Impressionist painters. The composition pays homage to Edgar Degas’s Young Spartans Exercising, while the colour scheme borrows from Edouard Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens. That, however, is where the similarities end. The scenes and subjects in both these masterpieces are brimming with vitality and youth. By contrast, the women in Exorcism are lifeless, grey silhouettes overshadowed by the daunting, dark figures of the shamans. Although it portrays a sacred tradition, it lacks the tone that would convey the importance of such a ceremony.
Hope centres on the Kenyan youth who have been robbed of their past and future by their elders. Since the 1950s, the country’s unemployment rates have ranked as the highest in the world. The former generation exhausted agricultural jobs, leaving the youth with little to no future prospects. The painting shows an immensely fragile, gnarled figure with seemingly shrunken arms, thighs and hands. The boxy, masculine shoulders hold a disproportionately large head adorned with similarly confused features. The broad but thin lips, the crooked nose and the narrow forehead could belong to a person of any gender or age. The body is distorted as if it had been worn out by violence. A bright red, fleshy, slimy, palpitating cord is hanging loosely from under the soft pale pink cloth of the dress covering the lap and the torso of the figure, the cord is tied to the belly of a young donkey. The mutilated figure is the symbol of the Kenyan youth who are burdened with unfulfillable responsibilities. Armitage’s pieces often fetishise suffering and pain but, in this case, the monstrous features, the crooked posture, the wrinkle-ridden face is that which attracts our curiosity, for all the wrong reasons.
Hope takes tendencies present in most of Armitage’s paintings to new extremes. The expected reaction to such a scene of brutality should be one of horror. Instead, the thick, glowing, flawless layers of paint trigger excitement. Armitage is playing an optical trick of sorts. Most of the pieces on show are beautiful and seductive but because the style and the subject choice are so deeply paradoxical, the viewer is pushed into a perplexing position. Either we play along and embody the sadistic voyeur who takes pleasure in witnessing the suffering of others, or we are left with an unending stream of deeply contradictory visual sensations. Every piece appears gorgeous, but underneath lie scenes of immorality and trauma.
The imperfections of the canvas often resemble wounds, marks left behind by acts of aggression, small holes and scabs. Instead of the traditional linen, Armitage uses the bark of the Lubugo tree. The fabric is sienna-orange in colour, flexible and fairly thick. Its imperfections are the result of the long hours of burning, soaking and beating the tree bark until it reaches the desired levels of elasticity. The Lubugo tree bark is most frequently used to cover the dead during burying ceremonies. For Armitage, it functions as the base on to which he can build his eccentric image worlds. The use of the Lubugo tree bark represents Armitage’s approach to painting at large. The painter hijacks the motifs and formulae of traditional art history in order to address how these contributed to and indirectly sustained the problems that prevail in his country of origin, Kenya. Underneath the lavish brushstrokes and rich coats of oil paint lies a rough and crude material, one that leaves creases and folds on the smooth surface of the canvas.
With a style borrowed from masters such as Manet, Degas, Titian and the like, with subjects taken from social media posts, news coverage, pop culture and indigenous African folklore, Armitage has built an oeuvre from incongruous visual languages. The viewer is confronted with a set of seductive, extremely beautiful, stylistically flawless paintings. They do not depict suffering in the way Western audiences may have grown accustomed to and sceptical towards. Our thirst for sensations is overwhelmed. But regardless of the reactions we can muster, there is a price to pay. Even if we go ahead and do feast our eyes on the scenes of horror, the experience will eventually turn into one of bitter remorse. §
Michael Armitage’s Chapel is showing at the South London Gallery until the 23rd of February. More information can be accessed here.