Michael Armitage:Stranger Than Paradise?

A pesky poultry pilferer runs away in front of a background of what appears to be luminous discs and melting playing cards while being pursued by what looks like some kind of simian wearing a burning pair of flares. In Michael Armitage's world, a place of giant toads, child kings, grown ups playing leapfrog, and sexually provocative baboons, it's an almost prosaic piece of work.

The Chicken Thief (2019) 

But in its bright and bold use of colour, its powerful characterisation, and its irregular but firm narrative it is not atypical of the work of the young (not even forty yet - it's so unfair) Kenyan painter. When I saw Armitage's show at the South London Gallery in February 2018 I remarked how I was looking forward to seeing more of his work.

That show was Armitage's first show in a London gallery and, three and a half years later, he's showing, at no less an institution as the Royal Academy. Although the show, Paradise Edict, features other East African artists (from Uganda and Tanzania as well as Kenya) they are there to complement Armitage and to show what influenced him. It is, to all intents and purposes, a solo show.

Born in Nairobi and trained in London, Armitage explores the culture, society, and politics of East African society in his work by combining traditional East African styles (for instance, and as mentioned in my previous correspondence on the artist, using Lubugo bark cloth as a canvas) with more celebrated, and renowned, names from European art history.

Pathos and the twilight of the idle (2019)

Gauguin, perhaps, is the most obvious and the programme makes claims for Goya and Titian but I am also reminded of Bosch, Raphael, and, most strongly of all, El Greco. The hallucinatory colours and bodies extended into almost ghostly apparitions of themselves seem to owe something to the man born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Crete in 1541.

That's not to say Michael Armitage is not his own man. He very much is. It's not always easy, and sometimes darn impossible, to fully understand what Armitage's paintings are about so the notices pinned to the walls of the galleries, and handed out at the door, are helpful. Paintings like The Fourth Estate come from a series made during the 2017 Kenyan elections when Armitage joined a television crew filming in Nairobi's Uhutu Park and was impressed with the carnivalesque scenes he witnessed.

The banner of the toad, not the only toad in the show, it is suggested, represents political deceit while in Pathos and the twilight of the idle (sic, above) a man in a denim skirt and bright yellow bikini is a depiction, possibly with some artistic license, of a protestor paid to stir unrest during the election. It's not just his dress that is intended to provoke but the slingshots he carries through the crowd with, we assume, intent to harm or at least scare people off.

The Fourth Estate (2017)

The promise of change (2018)

The Accomplice (2019)

Further violence is both threatened and enacted (this time with what appear to be both machetes and good old fashioned kicking) in The Accomplice, watched over - as so often - by sinister baboons, and The Promise of Change sees a hobgoblinesque boy king in red robes speaking into a microphone. It may be just me but I can't help seeing this one as a critique of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

What's occurring in Mkokoteni is anyone's guess but to me it looks like one man is being put to use as a human ox, yoked to some kind of plough while the original ploughmaster (that's definitely a word, yeah) has been either leapfrogged, or more likely ploughjacked (that's one too) by an even more violent usurper.

Mkokoteni (2019)

The Dumb Oracle (2019)

Whatever. It doesn't look fun to be involved with but it is compelling to look at. Which could equally be said of the embittered yet proud face subject to the admonishments of a host of unsolicited palms and fists in 2019's The Dumb Oracle.

It'd be great to say that the room of the show devoted to Armitage's East African forebears could shed some light on why he makes paintings the way he does but it doesn't really. Nonetheless it is enjoyable and interesting. Some of them (Asaph Ng'ethe Macua, Elimo Njau, and Theresa Musoke) attended the first art school in East Africa (the School of Fine Art at Makere University in Kampala, Uganda) while others (Sane Wadu, Meek Gichugu) are primarily self-taught and reliant on a loose collective they formed in reaction to the university educated artists to get their work out there to the wider public.

Asaph Ng'ethe Macua The Genocide (undated)

Meek Gichugu - No Erotic They Say (undated)

Meek Gichugu - No Erotic They Say (detail) (undated)

It's a mixed, but enthralling, bag of work. Much of it inspired by Christian belief or at least the East African iteration and interpretation of it. Most striking, for me, is Macua's The Genocide which conjures visions of a Dantean fall from grace as if imagined by a contemporary of Hieronymus Bosch. It's as unnerving as it is engrossing.

No Erotic They Say, Gichugu's work seems to have been named by Fela Kuti, is rather fantastic. Evoking medieval plague masks, Heath Robinson, and even, and maybe this is just me, Joseph Beuys although I wasn't sure if the legend (zoomed in on above) "Brother wise hooking wisdom $ freedom" had been intended by the artist or had been added by a sympathetic, or perhaps unsympathetic, visitor to the RA.

Sane Wadu is not his real name. He took the name Sane after his neighbours mocked him, calling him 'insane', for leaving a safe career to pursue art. His Pregnant Man may be a somewhat obvious, even crude, way of making people in his community consider gender but it is an effective one nonetheless. Accidental Enmity (Fallen Tree After the Storm) and My Life are both pictorially stronger but, again for me, Theresa Musoke's work tops them all.

Sane Wadu - Pregnant Man (undated)

Sane Wadu - Accidental Enmity (Fallen Tree After the Storm) (1980-1990)

Sane Wadu - My Life (1980-1990)

Theresa Musoke - Untitled (undated)

Looking initially as if an abstract piece, further inspection reveals a small number of antelope looking somewhat pensive or, more likely, wary - as befits antelope and their place in the food chain. Musoke was one of the first women to graduate from the Makerere School and animals, animals of East Africa such as buffalo, tend to feature heavily in her work.

Often blending handsomely with the background as if camouflaged. The Tanzanian artist Elimo Njau is, we're informed, best known for murals of biblical scenes and others paying tribute to those who lost their lives in the Mau Mau Uprising of 1952-1960. He founded the Paa-Ya-Paa ('The Antelope Rises') Gallery in Nairobi in 1965 and his Dream Landscape reminds me of some of Paul Nash's war paintings in that it depicts a beautiful landscape but one that has been despoiled almost into abstraction by man's lust for power, hateful behaviour, and avaricious desires.

Elimo Njau - Dream Landscape (1968)

Sheath (2016)

Numbers (Mau Mau) (2014)

Baboon (2016)

The inclusion of these older artists add depth to the exhibition and a greater understanding as to where it is that Armitage is coming from but they don't explain a painting like 2016's Baboon. A strangely human like ape poses naked with only a large bunch of ripe bananas to hide his, or her, modesty. If it's a him one can only assume he's a big lad.

Perhaps that's the point. But it seems there's probably more going on. Especially if you consider 2019's Mydas which plays on the classical legend of King Midas who wished for the power to turn all he touched to gold. The story of Midas is normally told as a warning about greed (you can't eat gold, that kind of thing) but Armitage has delved a little deeper.

"Midas was a ruler with such good intentions. His wish wasn't just about greed. It was about helping his people in a time of drought". Armitage's Kenyan Midas/Mydas, underwater with some kind of leopard in his menagerie, is his imagining of a man from modern times attempting the same drastic, yet ultimately doomed to failure, act of alchemy in one final hope for the salvation of him and his people.

Mydas (2019)

Leopard print seducer (2016)

Antigone (2018)

What, ultimately, it feels is happening with Armitage's art is that he is giving a group of people, in this case East Africans, who have not been included in classical myth the dignity of being elevated into it. It's debatable they need to be part of this story, they have their own rich and complex stories to tell, but it does make for intriguing and unique art.

Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, he is saying, may look like paradise and may be full of wild and exotic animals like baboons and leopards but that is to view it in a reductive fashion. The UK is more than the Lake District, Snowdonia, Cornwall and squirrels, deer, and badgers and so is everywhere else. People make a place as much place makes a people and here we can see that writ large and writ proud. 

Antigone, named - you'll be getting a feel by now - for a Greek tragedy explores the pressures that African women face to marry in order to secure social status but it could equally address Western ideas of African female sexuality. Either way, Antigone herself ain't blushing. She looks out us in almost confrontational fashion as if to dare us to question her authority.

That a man painted it only mildly detracts from its message. Perhaps most emblematic of the show, and thus the work giving it its title, is The Paradise Edict. It could almost be one of Henri Rousseau's imagined jungles (painted from the zoological gardens in Paris I seem to recall) and evokes a tourist brochure idea of the region but look closer. There is violence lurking within the landscape and, for Armitage, violence always lurks within paradise. It doesn't really make sense but he's trying to make sense of it the best way he can.

Another triumph. Once again, I look forward to seeing what he comes up with next.

The Paradise Edict (2019)