Solo Exhibitions (Selection - Chronological order)
Galerie de l'UQAM - Momenta Biennale, Montreal (Canada), 2025
"Twòn Kréyol" curated by Marie-Ann Yemsi
Twòn Kreyol unfolds a space where memory intertwines with dream. Through collage and assemblage, Raphaël Barontini combines the iconography of art history, colonial-era ethnographic photographs, and sculptural objects such as West African masks and sacred artefacts to create portraits, costumes, and frescoes inspired by carnival parades and rites of resistance. Barontini focuses on several emblematic figures in the struggle against slavery, setting them in tension with the mechanisms of their erasure from official history—thereby examining the power relations at play in representation.
On view from September 4, through October 25, 2025.
Photo Credit : Michael Patten ©
Palais de Tokyo, Paris (France), 2025
"Somewhere in the night, the people dance" curated by Daria De Beauvais
Raphaël Barontini's exhibition at Palais de Tokyo reinterprets African and Caribbean histories through dynamic narratives that blend contemporary techniques with archival references. The exhibition features a variety of recent works, including paintings, costumes, and textiles, set within a scenography inspired by Haiti's Palais Sans Souci. Accompanied by a sound piece from poet and music producer Mike Ladd, Barontini’s work merges figuration with classical painting traditions. The exhibition explores the intersection of reality and fiction, renewing collective imaginaries.
The title Somewhere in the Night, the People Dance, draws inspiration from Aimé Césaire’s play The Tragedy of King Christophe, reflecting on Haiti’s post-slavery challenges and the resilience of the Haitian people. Evokes both the struggles and collective joy found in rebuilding after colonialism.
On view from February 25 through May 11, 2025.
Photo Credit : Aurélien Mole ©
Currier Museum of Art, Manchester NH (U.S.A), 2024
"I live a journey of a Thousand years" curated by Lorenzo Fusi
The exhibition title paraphrases a passage from the poem Calendrier lagunaire, published in 1982 by the late Martinican author and politician Aimé Césaire, which reads: “I dwell in a thousand-year journey.”
This is a journey that Barontini feels he is living, alongside those whose life experiences result from uprooting and displacement, and whose identities have been forged by encounters with other cultures through processes of creolization. These processes were described by Martinique-born French philosopher Édouard Glissant as a complex entanglement of different cultures forced into cohabitation, as in the case of the Antilles and other countries in the Caribbean.
The exhibition comprises about twenty works and is Barontini’s largest presentation to date at a US institution. Closely following the commission entitled We Could be Heroes at the Panthéon in Paris – part of the Carte blanche series organized by France’s National Monuments Center – the exhibition at the Currier features La Bataille de Vertières (2023) as its centerpiece, a monumental 65-foot-wide painting that first premiered inside the Panthéon and will be on view in the US for the first time. The work is complemented by recent work from US private collections and several new pieces created specifically for the Currier Museum.
On view from March 7 through June 23, 2024.
Photo Credit : Currier Museum of Art ©
Pantheon, Paris (France), 2023
"We could be heroes" commissioned by CMN / National Monuments Center
Raphaël Barontini unveiled a major presentation at the Panthéon in Paris on October 19, 2023 and is on view through to February 11, 2024. The show is part of “one artist, one monument” program by the Centre des monuments nationaux.
The Centre des monuments nationaux has invited artist Raphaël Barontini to hold an exhibition in the Panthéon as part of the program titled Histoire & mémoires des combats contre l’esclavage (history and remembrances of anti-slavery struggles). The artist carried out his mission by designing two strong and interdependent components: a monumental installation, visible all throughout the exhibition, and a live performance on the opening day, and on October 22nd 2023.
With this monument of national memory, which honors numerous and important figures in the abolitionist movement (i.e. Condorcet, abbé Grégoire, Toussaint Louverture, Louis Delgrès, Schoelcher, Félix Éboué), Raphaël Barontini aims to shine a spotlight on heroic figures of the fight against slavery. Whether well-known or not, each played critical roles in achieving abolition.
The artist has designed an on-site installation composed of flags and banners in a guard of honor. The north and south transepts host two monumental textile installations. Several large-format textile works are suspended at different heights. Raphaël Barontini created a live performance that was premiered during the opening with carnival band Mas Choukaj and the musician Mike Ladd.
Raphaël Barontini wishes to grace the Panthéon’s nave with “a fresco that is both historic and sensitive, creolizing our imaginations, giving a sharp focus on not just the famed men and women who fought for liberty and equality, but also on the masses of anonymous enslaved persons.”
On view from October 19, 2023 through February 11, 2024.
Photo Credit : Benjamin Gavaudo ©
Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Paris (France), 2022
"Blue Lewoz" with a Critical text by Eva Barois De Caevel
Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to present Blue Lewoz, Raphaël Barontini’s second exhibition with the gallery and first in the Parisian space. Invoking European art history and period portraits from the Caribbean, Barontini appropriates cultures to compose his own narratives and figures, between tradition and Creolization. The Creole term Léwoz stems from the Afro-Caribbean music which was customary to Guadeloupe during the slave trade. These were festive weekend evenings for enslaved people to distract from their living conditions, accompanied by song and dance, the rhythm of the Gwoka and the sound of ka drums. The various levels of the gallery welcome traces of a collective rural and resistant tradition from the period of slavery. Through portraits on canvas, tapestries, curtains, flags and textile pieces this new series relays the inversion of a carnival. Painted characters present the actors of an imaginary and dreamlike nocturnal narrative that rewrites a history of the Caribbean. Blue Lewoz invites the visitor to enter a Creole ball tinged with indigo blue, the plant having been grown in the Caribbean during the slave era, a look into the history of textile through indigo pigment, one of the matrices of this parade. Dress codes, textile traditions and court representations are hybridized and reinvented. On the occasion of this exhibition, the artist unveils his own "Toile de Jouy" pattern screen-printed on curtains, dresses and capes, which become a mysterious and emblematic sign and pictogram. Accompanied by a sound piece created in 2019 by American hip-hop musician Mike Ladd and adapted for the exhibition, the secret ball will rumble through the plush salons where Lewoz dances are presented on wearable textiles. At the crossroads of European, African and Caribbean culture, Blue Lewoz examines a complex history and proposes a renewed imagination. Memory, festivity and ritual are combined to celebrate pictorial revelry with a futuristic accent.
On view from June 10th to July 23rd, 2022.
Photo Credit : Fabrice Gousset ©
Reiffers Art Initiative, Paris (France), 2021
"Soukhos" LVMH Métiers d'Art Residency Exhibition, curated by Léa Chauvel Lévy
Selected by LVMH in 2020, Barontini was featured as an artist residence in the heart of the Heng Long tannery in Singapore. The principle of the residency is to use the raw materials of a leading manufacturer in its field as the sources of a major artistic project. All of the works produced as well as several representative pieces of the artist's work will be presented at the Studio des Acacias by Mazarine, in partnership with Reiffers Art Initiatives. This endowment fund for young contemporary creation and cultural diversity aims to finance, exhibit and give visibility to the emerging figures of contemporary art of tomorrow.
On view from July 7 through July 28, 2021
Photo Credit : Nicolas Brasseur ©
Mariane Ibrahim Gallery (Chicago - U.S.A), 2021
"The Night of the purple moon"
Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce a solo exhibition with Raphaël Barontini, The Night of the Purple Moon, marking the gallery’s inaugural presentation with the artist and his first solo gallery show in the United States.
The gallery will be transformed into a Galerie des Illustres, an otherworldly environment with large scale portraits on canvas, cloaks, chaps and flags. Fictional heroes and historical reinterpretations embellish subjects from classical and canonical histories: from the Caribbean, Voodoo and magical deities, to function as a way for formerly enslaved humans to hold on to their African identity, despite the violence of Western colonialism. Barontini illuminates disparities in the visual and cultural history of the French Caribbean, which is rooted in African ancestry, yet virtually saturated with culture of an insular Caribbean.
The Night of the Purple Moon, is a lyrical coalescence of classical painting and fragments of contemporary culture. The paintings unveil works that adorn and disrupt the architype of heroes and, bestow a counter history and moment of reinvention of the Hero as an assemblage of various synergetic forces. The aim of this estrangement is primarily to alert the spectator of a different perception of the world; to renew the senses by distancing them from their conventional representations. The Night of the Purple Moon then becomes a place to nurture found freedom, creativity and pride.
Inspired by creatives such as Romare Bearden, and Hannah Höch who collaged a handful of materials and ideas to reflect the glitches of modern civilization during their time, Barontini meticulously builds a vernacular language of symbolism, artifact, and ritual.
The Night of the Purple Moon, embraces a nocturnal environment, where vibrant purples imbued with magic and new possibilities in which narratives emerge to catalyze a forthcoming revolution. From works on canvas, to large scale textile pieces to wearable garments – the artist presents the possibility of a new visual language, while referencing modern technology. Mixing different eras, spaces and geographies, the composite portraits arise from different types of media.
On view from January 30, through March 6, 2021
Crédit photo : Mariane Ibrahim ©
Musée Archéologique Henri Prades X MO.CO (Montpellier - France), 2021
"J'habite un long silence" curated by Rahmouna Boutayeb & Vincent Honoré
Raphaël Barontini places his singular gaze on the objects of ancient Lattara. Mechanical tapestries, large-format textile pieces, portable leather works and paintings will be displayed in the museum space. Using traditional painting, screen printing, digital printing and photography techniques, he creates "digital collages" intended to reconfigure and deprioritize world history. The artist confers on his works diverse influences, both in his relationship to art history and the poems of Aimé Césaire and through the link he weaves with the writings of Édouard Glissant and his notion of creolization.
In his work with multiple references, the eras merge, mix and add up through a temporal and plastic superposition.
On view from October 7, 2021 through March 7, 2022
Crédit Photo : Marc Domage ©
FWCA Fort Worth Contemporary Arts / TCU University, Fort Worth (USA), 2020
"Caribbean Fantasia" curated by Sara Jayne Parsons
Caribbean Fantasia is the second institutional solo exhibition in the U.S for the artist. Curated by Sara-Jayne Parsons, the curator and director of the TCU Art Galleries, the show was conceived in two axis: a classic presentation in the gallery and a collaborative performance.
During the opening, a parade of horse riders took place in the streets of the TCU campus.
Five African-American cow-boys of the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum (Fort-Worth) were wearing the art pieces of the show with a sound piece of the Hip-hop American musician Mike Ladd.
Caribbean Fantasia is a tribute to Haitian revolutionary figures who fought against slavery and colonization.
On view from February 28 through September 26, 2020
Photo credit : Lynné Bowman Cravens - The Art Galleries at TCU ©
SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (USA), 2019
"The Golden March" curated by Storm Janse Van Rensburg & Ben Tollefeson
Museum of Art presents The Golden March, a new public art commission and the first museum solo exhibition in the U.S. by Raphaël Barontini, an artist known for his dynamic installations that subvert visual tropes and iconographies. Barontini’s works are mostly fiber-based, and he creates images by layering screen prints and paintings, fashioning fantastical environments that evoke pageantry and ceremony. The artist explores ritualized celebration forms espoused by the African Diaspora and offers an ongoing interrogation and challenge to colonial iconographies.
The project is conceived within the framework of the exhibition Frederick Douglass: Embers of Freedom. Barontini’s work complements the Douglass exhibition while remaining wholly its own experience. The Golden March comprises two parts: a performance in collaboration with the Savannah High School Marching Band and a site-specific installation of new work for the four iconic Jewel Boxes lining the façade of the museum.
Like an opera in many acts, Barontini approached the commission as a fractional narrative and tribute to the life and work of abolitionist, author and social reformer Frederick Douglass. Each of the four Jewel Boxes is a poetic reflection on Douglass’ life history, in the form of large-scale textile installations based on visual material from the Douglass family archives of Dr. Walter O. Evans. Barontini also invokes the shapes and forms of protest banners, flags and boat sails, references to both Douglass’ legacy as a radical and revolutionary force in American history, as well as a symbol of his escape to freedom.
The performance entitled The Golden March was staged during the reception of the exhibition, with the marching band revealing each Jewel Box while carrying banners and flags created by the artist in a public parade.
The students and band members learnt different civil right movement songs and music tracks tracing the long march to freedom. From Aretha Franklin, to the Black National Anthem and to the Alright song created by Kendrick Lamar, the parade connected the struggles from the past to the contemporary ones.
