Galerie Cécile Fakhoury is pleased to participate in the new edition of 1-54 in New York. On this occasion, the gallery presents for the first time in the United States a solo exhibition of the Beninese artist Roméo Mivekannin. In the fair’s newest building characterised by its preserved industrial aesthetic, the artist’s work unfolds at the crossroads of temporalities, quoting historical works and creating contemporary dialogues.
This new series of works, conceived specifically for the occasion, extends Mivekannin’s deconstruction of the representation of figures of otherness - blacks, indigenous people, women - in the history of art.
On the very particular surface of his canvases, colored according to a secret mixture of elixir baths that give the backgrounds of the works their raw brown and marbled tones, Romeo Mivekannin meticulously revisits paintings from the collections of the greatest museums in the world (Met, Louvre, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza ... ) and thus leads us to question the mechanisms of our perception in front of representations which entered our collective unconscious and constitute today the standard of an established and exclusive cultural identity.
For this series, Romeo Mivekannin has chosen works representing women: Saint Cacilda after Francisco de Zurbaràn; Esther’s Toilet after Théodore Chassériau; Odalisque after Benjamin Constant or The Fortune Teller after Georges de la Tour. These paintings have in common their use of the female figure as a pretext to represent the fantasies of painters and the ideologies at their times, sometimes evoking the trappings of power represented in the guise of saints from the Christian pantheon in the 17th century; sometimes materializing an exotic elsewhere pursued by Orientalist painters of the early 19th century through bath scenes and harems.
For each of the works, Romeo Mivekannin obscures the settings to focus only on the characters who thus become the real protagonists of the story and not the mere bearers of an ideology... Except that instead of the character’s face, Romeo Mivekannin affixes his self-portrait and subverts certain details of the original work, creating a disturbing ambiguity. The act of collage is here voluntarily visible: the drapery of the clothes, the skin, the brigness of the jewels rendered with force of colors contrast with the black and white treatment that the artist applies to his own face. Where the characters of the original works seem to be busy with their task - objects of desire and fetishization - and offered to the spectator ‘s greedy eyes, Romeo Mivekannin’s portrait always returns us our gaze, preventing us from indulging in our passive consumption of images.
Romeo Mivekannin enters as by effraction and not without irony in this eurocentric and masculine art history. Inscribing himself brilliantly in the research of some of his contemporaries such as Kehinde Wiley, Mickaelene Thomas or Titus Kaphar, Romeo Mivekannin subverts the codes and reappropriates them, thus opening a new field of possibilities in the representation.
