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.