Galerie Cécile Fakhoury is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of the Beninese artist Roméo Mivekannin on the African continent, Les Âmes du peuple noir (The Souls of Black Folk).
The artist Roméo Mivekannin draws his inspiration from photographic archives and paintings emblematic of the history of Western art. From Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Slave Sale (1873) to Gustave Manet’s Olympia (1863), via the first photographic portraits of the colonial monarchies of the second half of the 19th century, Roméo Mivekannin focuses particularly on the ambiguous representations of black figures, sources of both fascination and fear, sometimes anonymised, eroticized or objectified and intended for the almost exclusive eye of a male and Euro-centric viewer.
The artist’s works, black acrylic paintings on canvases tinted by repeated baths of elixir, then become the site of the questioning of a marked iconography inherited from the systems of human trafficking and domination that were slavery and colonisation. Drawing a continuous direct line between past and contemporary history, the artist chooses to take up the facts of these historical representations and subvert their primary narrative in order to construct, not without irony, his own vision of common narratives.
«Take myself as a subject, take my own body as a subject.»
Romeo Mivekannin deploys an eloquent plastic quotation process. From one work to the next, the compositions of the canvases are in constant dialogue with a complex visual history made of direct references to classical painting and to the images of Épinal which defined the representation of blacks in 19th century Europe.
Faced with the inability to identify himself with these images and to weave a filiation with these narratives of history, Roméo Mivekannin fits into these regimes of representation, substituting his own portrait for those of the original black characters. The repeated appearance of the artist’s face, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes hidden in the crowds of extras, is disturbing.
Like an uncompromising assertion, the repetition embodies his desire to reappropriate a regime of visibility from which he had hitherto been excluded. In Mivekannin’s work, the act of representation is thus an intimate ritual of accession to identity. Each work has its own historical time. The canvases are repeatedly immersed in elixir baths, the composition of which only the artist knows, and which gives them their unique colouring. Then comes the time of painting. «In the voodoo tradition,» explains the artist, «each god corresponds to a deceased ancestor. When one wears the mask of one of these gods, of a person who has lived, it is an act of liberation».
Opposite the main gallery, in Project Space, Roméo Mivekannin proposes an installation around the book The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois, a work that is the foundation of the mobilisations around the recognition of black rights, in the United States and in the world. The installation is composed of 31 portraits of black political and cultural personalities, with a silkscreen print of one of the pages of the book. These women and men have played or are playing an important role in the fight against racism, discrimination and the rewriting of black political and cultural history. Roméo Mivekannin thus proposes to go back over the evolution of the struggles for Black rights through personalities with very different positions, discourses and popularity. In the centre of the canvas, represented in all their diversity, as subjects of the work and highlighted for their accomplishments, the representation of black people here follows on from the canvases presented in the main gallery. Beyond the process of taking up the canvases of Western art, Roméo Mivekannin thus adds his face to the portrait gallery that he presents, as a critic, creator and figure of a new generation to come.
In his works, Roméo Mivekannin brings to light the cogs of representation that carry the systems of domination and introduces a subtle critique, on the borderline between rewriting a collective memory and repairing a personal identity fracture.
