18 Avenue Matignon,
75008 Paris
https://marianeibrahim.com/exhibitions/48-raphael-barontini-blue-lewoz/overview/
The French artist’s latest solo exhibition transforms Mariane Ibrahim’s recently opened Parisian gallery into a Creole ball tinged with indigo blue, the plant having been grown in the Caribbean during the slave era. It offers a look inside the history of the textile through indigo pigment across portraits on canvas, tapestries, and curtains that invoke a feeling of carnival. (The term Lewoz stems from the Afro-Caribbean music played during festive weekend evenings that distracted enslaved people from their living conditions.) Invoking European art history and period portraits, Barontini renders painted characters as the actors of an imaginary and dreamlike nocturnal narrative that rewrites a history of the Caribbean.