For his second solo exhibition in Abidjan, entitled «Effractions», Roméo Mivekannin invites us to encounter the plurality and richness of his artistic universe, as a snapshot of his work, multidisciplinary and ambitious, playing with materials and seeking to disrupt the established boundaries of disciplines between them, in order to operate both formally and symbolically this act of effraction which is his own. The exhibition will present paintings, ceramic sculptures and a monumental installation, as many materials that dialogue with each other and testify to the bewitching metamorphoses of the artist.
For the time of this show, the gallery space becomes a theatre, where the artist and the public are invited to replay history in their own way, to reclaim the representations of which they have been the object. Roméo Mivekannin 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 European Orientalist painting, both plastically through his self-portrait and symbolically through the reversal that this reinterpretation implies, from a suffered gaze to a chosen gaze.
The series of paintings on fabric presented in the gallery space is unseen as Roméo uses colour in them, revealing a masterful mastery of pigments. It revolves around the theme of Orientalism, with the mirror image of the notion of Occidentalism; the construction of the Western gaze on the elsewhere and the use of visually seductive elements to mask certain relationships of domination inherent in the scenes represented. These works on free canvas extend Roméo Mivekannin’s 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 the middle of these works, three ceramic sculptures mark the space with their charged magnetic fields. Roméo Mivekannin began this sculptural work at the end of 2021, in an approach that combines abstraction - always in the background in his works -, architecture - his initial training - and a sociological and historical reading of space. Roméo Mivekannin designs ceramics with an almost metallic finish, whose sometimes brutalist forms are inspired by multiple references, ranging from Vodou myths to invisible sacred spaces; from archival photographs to ancestral motifs of traditional African architecture.
Here too there is an upsurge. Of the artist in this discipline; of these forms from the earth. The work Aïzan, which is partly inspired by a terrible archive photograph showing a slave with a back lacerated by whip blows, bears witness to the omnipresence of the wound in repair. Effraction always calls for the fracture, and in this sense ceramics seems to be a medium conducive to the articulation of a process of reappropriation around the idea of the breach, the break being always possible and underlying. The two other ceramics are inspired by the vodou deity called Tolegba, who guards the sacred places of Benin, a sort of protective, sometimes punitive totem on which organic offerings are placed, which accumulate in a thick layer over time. Roméo Mivekannin proposes here two versions of the Tolegba, one completely smooth and the other loaded with materials, which symbolize its antiquity and its power. These two works evoke the games of temporality and mirrors set up by the artist in this exhibition; when the glass breaks, our image is blurred, and perhaps then we can see the other side of the distorting mirror that is held up to us.
Finally, in the gallery’s garden, the visitor will discover a monumental installation, echoing the hundred-year-old tree that lives in the gallery and watches over it. Conceived in the manner of a chapel, in homage to the artist’s father, this installation creates a dome-shaped space made of geometric metal elements, divided into two parts, at the heart of which the viewer can sink. At the top of each floor of this dome, there are bottles of voodoo elixirs, symbolising access to the invisible world. Roméo Mivekannin proposes here a more intimate and spiritual experience, creating a space of recollection, where the inside and the outside communicate and where everyone is invited to reconnect with the beings of flesh or spirit that inhabit them.
With strength and subtlety, the artist unravels the threads of our confinement a little more each time, thus questioning our collective and intimate heritage. The artist’s works propose a form of resistance strategy that mixes emotion with a critical eye. In multiple and always sensitive forms, Roméo Mivekannin attempts to respond to the dispossession of his own image and to crack the wheels of a power that captures the imagination of individuals as well as their visible and tangible bodies.
