Romeo Mivekannin’s works create a theatre where the public is invited to replay history in its own way, to reappropriate the representations of which it may have been the object. The artist chooses to invite himself where he is not expected and to thwart the place that has been assigned to him. He breaks into the space of classical European painting, plastically through his self-portrait, symbolically through the reversal that this reinterpretation implies, from a suffered gaze to a chosen gaze.
Romeo Mivekannin’s work is illustrated, for example, in his painting on free canvas. Like an initiation rite, the artist immerses the sheets that will form the background of his works in different baths of ritual solutions, baths of elixir, and thus makes them the place where a marked iconography inherited from the systems of human trafficking and domination that were slavery and colonisation is questioned.
If the break-in always calls for fracture, each new experience of the artist extends her gesture of embodying the counter-narrative of certain discourses of domination, by seizing with irony and subtlety the act of self-representation. The artist thus reaffirms the subversive meaning he gives to the act of reappropriation which, when it proceeds from an imitation of the other, is inevitably also a way of revealing him by revealing oneself.
In multiple and always sensitive forms, Romeo Mivekannin attempts to respond to the dispossession of his own image and to crack the workings of a power that captures the imagination of individuals as well as their visible and tangible bodies.