Black Mirror
Roméo Mivekannin
For his first solo exhibition in Italy, Roméo Mivekannin has conceived a cohesive body of work that unfolds through several rooms of Collezione Maramotti.
The show is made up of about twenty new paintings on black velvet, most of them large-scale. They draw on Mivekannin’s vast iconographic universe, introducing ideas kindled by his visits to Emilia-Romagna and by his ties to the Italian world of art and culture.
The legacy of the past crops up everywhere in this project, as do the ghosts of world history that continue to shape our own era. At its heart is a formal and existential challenge to the idea of the Self, rooted in a reflection on the human condition.
Reconstructing and inhabiting iconographies borrowed from classic works of art by Masaccio and Caravaggio, from photos in the press, from movements and archetypes found in dance and cinema – Pina Bausch, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sergei Parajanov, Leos Carax – or from his own archives, Mivekannin moulds a multiform self-portrait, becoming a reflection of the images that fascinate and interrogate him.
Self-portraiture, incorporated in a precise yet pervasive way, is the tool through which Mivekannin enters the narrative as a subject, taking the place of the original figures—a powerful, phantasmal, disquieting Self in the body of the Other. His face seems to float out of the depths of the night; his penetrating gaze probes the viewer and disrupts the compositional logic, subverting roles and power dynamics (both inside and outside the work) and yielding an instable space in constant transformation.
These works encapsulate the artist’s exploration of how memory and images are constructed and suppressed, of our individual and collective relationship to history and the sacred. Devoid of frames or stretchers, they seem to hover, brimming with presences; they reveal a form of mythmaking as private as it is universal, infused with secret visions that have undergone processes of apparition, eclipse, erasure and inner struggle.
In both form and content, this open-ended series of investigations is anchored to a duality already central to Mivekannin’s work, which has always been inhabited by diverging tensions: visible/invisible, black/white, negative/positive, conscious/unconscious. Some of the paintings have actually been conceived as “duos”, in a relationship of correspondence and variation: they neither stand in reciprocal opposition, nor exist solely through mutual dependence, but echo and reflect each other.
The technique employed, which is new in this artist’s practice, sprang from his response to a work by Julian Schnabel on view at Collezione Maramotti. Experimenting for the first time with painting on velvet, Mivekannin has created a sensory approach to the work in which this fabric becomes a true, present body, revealing its extraordinary capacity to absorb colour and light: a black mirror that does not reflect signs and images, but rather breathes them in and traps them within its fibres.
Mivekannin, who grew up in Benin and studied in France, interweaves ancestral African narratives and traditions with symbols and depictions from Western art history.
Initially focused on stereotyped portrayals of Africans under colonialism, his work went on to explore the anonymous, marginal, decorative, exotic role assigned to Black people, slaves, and female figures in European art, dismantling it through disquieting visual interference and fluid semantic shifts. The constant reiteration of his face on oppressed or secondary subjects, often looking at the viewer as if seeking activation, is Mivekannin’s signature trait.