Exposition
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On vast assemblages of suspended fabrics, the Beninese artist virtuously subverts emblematic works by integrating his portrait to denounce the hierarchy of bodies in the history of art.
His works in grisaille are of the same wood as the reverse of the triptychs, when you fold back a shutter to see what is behind, when you go around the work to discover a mystery in black and white. Go to the other side of the official painting, divert the great works: often the Beninese artist Roméo Mivekannin draws his own face, which always stares at us, and intrudes at the very top of the Raft of The Medusa or gives its features to Madeleine, the beautiful portrait of a black woman, former slave, painted by Marie-Guillemine Benoist.
We were talking about wood, but the famous works that Mivekannin reproduces and diverts are imposed on vast canvases of fabric, suspended in the Glass Pavilion of the Louvre-Lens. Invite a painter who revisits history painting in the continuity of the Galerie du temps, which has just been redesigned in Lens, “it’s continuing to write history”, explains Annabelle Ténèze, the director of the place.
There is a sculptural quality to these acrylic-painted canvases, yet flat and frameless. Perhaps because Roméo Mivekannin, who today lives in Toulouse, was trained in cabinetmaking and architecture before devoting himself to painting and art history. Or because the shadows of the bodies that he draws with virtuosity
