Dieu n’est pas obligé (God Is Not Obliged) is the title chosen by Roméo Mivekannin for his third solo exhibition in Côte d’Ivoire, presented at Galerie Cécile Fakhoury. Through a pantheon of rituals and images, Roméo Mivekannin gives form to a quest spanning West Africa, Europe and Brazil, shaped by manifestations of the sacred, the metamorphosis of gestures and the ambivalence of religious belief.
Emerging from the profound density of black velvet, these apparitions guide us to the threshold of a space activated by rites of passage and visions of sacrifice and initiation, drawn from Baroque painting (Agnus Dei, after Zurbarán (1645–1650)), colonial archives (Cérémonie du pacte d’amitié, after Frédéric Gadmer (1930)) and contemporary photography (Sob os olhos da Igreja [Under the Eyes of the Church], after Giacomo Mancini (2020)). Roméo Mivekannin continues to broaden the scope of his references in an increasingly cross-disciplinary manner, following a period of exploring more narrowly defined iconographic corpora. In Abidjan, the exhibition Les âmes du peuple noir (2020) orchestrated a reversal of the gaze directed at colonial archives, between Africa and the rest of the world, through a brushstroke of black paint applied to unstretched canvases tinted with elixirs. Two years later, the exhibition Effractions (2022) extended this approach to Orientalism, as colour burst into previously austere canvases. This new body of work in Côte d’Ivoire, painted predominantly in white acrylic, follows significant residency and exhibition experiences that have shaped the artist’s trajectory, notably at the Collezione Maramotti, where his technique of painting on velvet first emerged, as well as in Salvador de Bahia and São Paulo, where he engaged with the history and cultures of Afro-Brazilian communities.
By exploring images as constitutive elements of our psyche and our ways of seeing, Roméo Mivekannin’s works resonate with cycles of history that seem to repeat themselves, sometimes overtly, but also unconsciously. This is evident in the persistence of racial stereotypes in iconography and, more broadly, in the perpetuation of systems of domination in all their forms. Mivekannin responds by introducing into his paintings what he calls “visual irritation”, disrupting and reversing the dynamics of this inherited legacy. He regenerates new cycles and new resonances, more subterranean in nature, while continuing to follow the traces left behind in images. This new body of work thus invokes the connections that unite African and diasporic spiritualities, recounting their hybridisation and metamorphoses across the Atlantic world. Born of these rich exchanges, Iniciação-Iganhin (Initiation into Infangni), after Pierre Fatumbi Verger (1958), draws on an archival photograph taken in Benin by a French photographer and preserved in Brazil. The work Novo Samba, after Pedro Miceli (2026), explores the richness and depth of this cultural and spiritual hybridity through the fusion of Afro-Japanese costumes in Brazil.
This sacred dimension, which has always been integral to Roméo Mivekannin’s artistic research, naturally evolves towards contemporary references that capture the resurgence of gestures transcending bodies and cultures. In this respect, the contemporary choreographies reinterpreted in his paintings can be read as echoes of age-old gestures, as in the pagan sacrificial rite of Le Sacre du Printemps, after Germaine Acogny (2020), or Bolero, after Wesley Ruzibiza (2022). These works constitute a mise en abyme of references that also branch out across disciplines. Le Sacre du Printemps reaches us through Germaine Acogny, after Pina Bausch, after Vaslav Nijinsky and Igor Stravinsky. Likewise, Bolero is reinterpreted through Wesley Ruzibiza, after Maurice Béjart, after Ida Rubinstein and Maurice Ravel… For Roméo Mivekannin, every artist necessarily follows in the footsteps of those who came before. Images and symbols form a long succession of shapes that appear and disappear throughout a human history that is often tumultuous.
Similarly, the titles of his exhibitions have often paid tribute to landmark works by Black and African writers. Here, by placing the exhibition under the aegis of Allah n’est pas obligé (Allah Is Not Obliged), the novel by the writer Ahmadou Kourouma, Roméo Mivekannin situates his new paintings within an ambivalence he describes as “of blood and honey”. An immersion in the sacred inevitably entails an examination of religion in its ambiguous and sometimes extreme manifestations. In his novel, Ahmadou Kourouma gives voice to a child from Guinea caught in the machinery of the civil war in Liberia. From an early age, the young Birahima’s journey is marked by the instrumentalisation of religious beliefs and their distortion. To survive, he becomes a child soldier and joins forces with an opportunistic businessman uncle who has reinvented himself as a grigriman, a practitioner of protective charms. From this, he derives the expression Allah n’est pas obligé d’être juste dans toutes ses choses ici-bas (Allah is not obliged to be fair in all his dealings down here), which becomes for him a source of hope, as well as a refrain that helps him justify the unjustifiable. In a similar vein, the painting Au nom du Christ, after Roger Gnoan M’Bala (1993), revisits a nocturnal baptism scene, a pivotal moment in this parable-like film by the Ivorian director, in which a marginalised man transforms himself into a prophet and leads credulous villagers into a sectarian spiral.
All these figures, whether reflecting initiates, dancers or priestesses, recounting a wandering or capturing a ritual, emerge from the same deep black velvet. On this elusive medium, at once a hanging, a garment and a floating surface freed from any stretcher, the figures seem to struggle against being swallowed by the darkness from which they have emerged. Chosen by the artist for its capacity to produce the deepest possible black, entirely free of reflections, this support becomes in his works a mysterious threshold, a shadowy realm shaped by dreams or the unconscious that informs our minds and our ways of seeing. As is consistently the case in Roméo Mivekannin’s practice, each work captures a moment of equilibrium, following a precarious path along a ridge until an apparition emerges.
Francis Coraboeuf
