Exhibition booklets can be a striking complement to an artist’s work, and this was the case when Chloé Desvenain, founder of Paris-based graphic design studio Fakepaper, made a booklet dedicated to the paintings of artist Roméo Mivekannin for Parisian Galerie Cecile Fakhoury.
Born in Bouaké on the Ivory Coast of West Africa, and now living and working between Toulouse and Benin, Roméo Mivekannin creates compositions that build a discussion between references of classical painting and the visual representations of Black people in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. His work explores how the past shapes his current identity through painting, sculpture and installations.
This was Fakepaper’s first collaboration with the gallery where Roméo Mivekannin’s work was part of the Paris + Basel event in 2022. The studio designed a booklet large enough to give space to Mivekannin’s paintings, and they also referred to his work in order to choose the material and printing techniques for the booklet.
The cover was blind embossed by Parisian workshop, Duvinage, which manufactures printed objects. There is also a small cohesive detail that ties in the hems at the edge of the artist’s canvases – using Singer sewing for the binding of the booklet. The interior pages are digitally printed.
When asked about the materials used for the booklet, Desvenain said, ‘The colour of the cover paper echoes the shades used by the artist in his paintings. This harmony creates a feeling of continuity and interesting visual resonance.’ She also mentions, ‘We wanted to give particular importance to the sense of touch, so that the object can also be discovered through the texture of the paper. This also echoes the very rough and coated canvases that Mivekannin uses.’
