At the end of the Temps gallery of the Louvre-Lens is the Glass Pavilion. In the Gallery the past unfolds, in a solemn, encyclopedic form and a little boring in the long run, despite the presence of some remarkable living people – Simone Fattal, Zanele Muholi and Kent Monkman. In the Pavilion, the present looks at this beautiful past through the eyes of Roméo Mivekannin.
The Beninese artist, who has lived in France for a long time, makes the history of Western art his raw material. He takes famous works and interprets them according to his own method. He works on recycled fabrics that he sews together. On these floating surfaces, he repainted the canvases he seized. He sometimes enlarges their format and visibly modifies them. On the one hand, he prefers black, white and gray effects, even if, from now on, he sometimes introduces bursts of color. On the other hand, for the original faces, feminine or masculine, young or old, he substitutes his own, that of a man born in Ivory Coast in 1986.
The majority of the paintings collected here, the oldest of which dates from 2020, are revivals of masterpieces kept at the Louvre: double full-length portrait by Rembrandt; Deianira kidnapped by the centaur Nessusby Reindeer; The Raft of the Medusaby Géricault; Women of Algiers in their apartmentby Delacroix. These choices are considered: the Géricault refers to the history of the colonization of Africa, the Delacroix to orientalism, the Rembrandts to the triangular trade which made the fortune of Amsterdam and the Reni brings to mind other kidnappings and rapes, not mythological but real.
Historical Analysis Lessons
Likewise, when Mivekannin takes up the portrait of a woman painted in 1800 by Marie-Guillemine Benoist, he recalls, as we know today, that the painter had taken as a model a freed slave from Guadeloupe. Even more direct are the paintings which seize images taken at the time of the conquest of Dahomey (1890-1894) by France: a group of royal Amazons and another of relatives of the defeated king Béhanzin, brutally photographed as curiosities exotic. Thus these paintings are both lessons in historical analysis of the ancient works that they reproduce and acts of indictment.
This part of the artist’s work, which earned him prompt recognition, is now known. Until now, the one revealed in the dark room in the center of the Pavilion was much less so. There are two tall ceramic sculptures there, containers bristling with points, built from memory after ceremonies seen in Beninese voodoo convents.
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