Artists

Raphaël Barontini creates a hybrid visual language that merges painting, photography, digital print, and screen printing to produce vibrant banners, tapestries, flags, and ceremonial garments. Drawing on histories of slavery and colonization, his practice establishes “counter-histories” that elevate overlooked figures from liberation struggles and Afro-diasporic legacies, both real and imagined. At once celebratory and critical, his works question representations of power, ritual, and ceremony while proposing new mythologies rooted in resilience and cultural plurality.

Barontini often activates his textile works through processional performances, most notably Déboulé céleste, a three-part piece featuring dancers and musicians in seventy hand-crafted costumes. These immersive, carnivalesque stagings extend his exploration of memory and representation into collective, public experience.

His work has been exhibited widely, including at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah; MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine; the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; and the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH. He has participated in biennials in Bamako, Casablanca, Lima, and Thessaloniki, and completed a residency with LVMH Métiers d’Art in Singapore in 2020. In 2023, the Centre des Monuments Nationaux invited him to present We Could Be Heroes at the Panthéon in Paris, a major solo project that reimagined the site’s monumental history.

Barontini is represented by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery (Chicago, Paris, Mexico City).