DEFINING CREOLE ART
A festival of vibrantly dyed textile work, large scale portraiture and sound compose Raphaël Barontini’s new show. Blue Lewoz, on view until July 23 at the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in Paris, interrogates festive traditions of the Creole culture of Guadalupe’s enslaved people. The show is momentous for the artist, as his first solo gallery show in his city of residence. This new collection further develops the artist’s thematic and technical concerns, and invites visitors to experience a saturated, creolised account-taking of European and Caribbean histories.
The problem of articulating Raphaël Barontini’s work begins with selecting a medium to describe his pieces. Painting allows for the articulation of an important modality of his work but fails to accommodate his matrixed use of screen printing and digital image use. Picture seems more apt, dually a container for his photographic and painterly techniques. Yet a picture requires an image, a clarified representation of one kind or another, something Barontini often resists in his abstractly arranged compositions. Collage might be the closest approximation language will allow for, and his work expands upon this flexible medium, merging theory with practice.
