The Pavillon de verre at Louvre-Lens lets light in like a door to the past. Inside, shadow works. Roméo Mivekannin's exhibition L'envers du temps unfolds quietly, but with a rare density. The works of this Franco-Beninese artist don't simply reinterpret the masterpieces of Western art: they turn them upside down, place them in tension, and turn them on their forgotten side. That of absent bodies. That of silent faces.
Worn sheets, soaked in baths of voodoo elixirs, become canvases. Domestic linen, inherited or salvaged, marked by usage, sweat and past lives. Mivekannin affixes black figures, often drawn from colonial archives or his own memory, which he blends into the fabric of canonical works. Here, a rereading of the Raft of the Medusa: the castaways no longer beg, they accuse. Here, a female body, inspired by classical painting, whose gaze has been shifted - as if stolen - to bear an older, graver memory.
The strength of this exhibition comes not from a spectacular gesture, but from an obstinate technique. Each piece is a field of tension. The painter doesn't quote Géricault, Ingres or Manet: he confronts them with their own silence. He inserts his self-portrait at the heart of the works - present body, troubled face, witness to a fractured memory. In one work, his face emerges from behind a veil, as if looking back through the centuries at a history he now refuses to endure.
This work immediately reminded me of Kehinde Wiley, in her brilliant, frontal re-reading of aristocratic portraits, and Kara Walker, in her way of hijacking figures to charge them with darkness, in the political sense of the word. But Mivekannin has something else: a ritualistic, almost liturgical slowness that also harks back to the work of William Kentridge, in the way he extracts the political from the past without ever sacrificing form.
A year ago, the Louvre-Lens presented Exils - Regards d'artistes, an invaluable exhibition that was a little too smooth, almost contemplative. L'envers du temps goes further. It disturbs. It scratches. It takes us backwards. Certain works, inspired by ethnographic photographic portraits from the early 20th century, are striking for the vitality they breathe into frozen figures. They are no longer objects of observation: they become subjects of history.
The Louvre-Lens, with its glass pavilion, offers a striking contrast between aerial architecture and frontal purpose. This spatial tension gives Mivekannin's canvases a breath of fresh air. We move between them as if in a fragile temple. Nothing is frontal. Everything is hushed. But nothing is neutral.
The exhibition runs until June 2, 2025. It's a rendezvous with the unspoken. A way of making masterpieces speak without making them say what they never wanted to say. It's not a rewrite. It's a return. A return to what has been erased.
