For his first solo exhibition in Italy, Roméo Mivekannin has conceived a cohesive physique of labor that unfolds by a number of rooms of Collezione Maramotti. The present is made up of about twenty new work on black velvet, most of them large-scale. They draw on Mivekannin’s huge iconographic universe, introducing concepts kindled by his visits to Emilia-Romagna and by his ties to the Italian world of artwork and tradition.
The legacy of the previous crops up in all places on this mission, as do the ghosts of world historical past that proceed to form our personal period. At its coronary heart is a proper and existential problem to the thought of the Self, rooted in a mirrored image on the human situation.
Reconstructing and inhabiting iconographies borrowed from traditional artistic endeavors by Masaccio and Caravaggio, from pictures within the press, from actions and archetypes present in dance and cinema—Pina Bausch, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sergei Parajanov, Leos Carax—or from his personal archives, Mivekannin moulds a multiform self-portrait, turning into a mirrored image of the photographs that fascinate and interrogate him.
Self-portraiture, included in a exact but pervasive means, is the software by which Mivekannin enters the narrative as a topic, taking the place of the unique figures—a strong, phantasmal, disquieting Self within the physique of the Different. His face appears to drift out of the depths of the night time; his penetrating gaze probes the viewer and disrupts the compositional logic, subverting roles and energy dynamics (each inside and outdoors the work) and yielding an instable house in fixed transformation.
These works encapsulate the artist’s exploration of how reminiscence and pictures are constructed and suppressed, of our particular person and collective relationship to historical past and the sacred. Devoid of frames or stretchers, they appear to hover, brimming with presences; they reveal a type of mythmaking as personal as it’s common, infused with secret visions which have undergone processes of apparition, eclipse, erasure and interior battle.
In each kind and content material, this open-ended collection of investigations is anchored to a duality already central to Mivekannin’s work, which has all the time been inhabited by diverging tensions: seen/invisible, black/white, destructive/optimistic, acutely aware/unconscious. A few of the work have truly been conceived as “duos”, in a relationship of correspondence and variation: they neither stand in reciprocal opposition, nor exist solely by mutual dependence, however echo and replicate one another.
The approach employed, which is new on this artist’s follow, sprang from his response to a piece by Julian Schnabel on view at Collezione Maramotti. Experimenting for the primary time with portray on velvet, Mivekannin has created a sensory strategy to the work through which this material turns into a real, current physique, revealing its extraordinary capability to soak up color and light-weight: a black mirror that doesn’t replicate indicators and pictures, however quite breathes them in and traps them inside its fibres.
Mivekannin, who grew up in Benin and studied in France, interweaves ancestral African narratives and traditions with symbols and depictions from Western artwork historical past. Initially targeted on stereotyped portrayals of Africans underneath colonialism, his work went on to discover the nameless, marginal, ornamental, unique function assigned to Black folks, slaves, and feminine figures in European artwork, dismantling it by disquieting visible interference and fluid semantic shifts. The fixed reiteration of his face on oppressed or secondary topics, typically wanting on the viewer as if looking for activation, is Mivekannin’s signature trait.
at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia
till July 27, 2025
