Maxwell Alexandre’s Debut at Palais de Tokyo Considers Power Dynamics in Art Spaces

Maxwell Alexandre’s exhibition “New Power,” currently on view at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris through March 20th, was inspired in part by the 2018 music video for “Apeshit” by Beyoncé and Jay-Z. The hip-hop couple’s triumphant traipsing through Europe’s most famous museum, the Louvre, reignited conversations about the sociology of museum visitors; the value and accessibility of culture; and above all, the tension between the museum’s pretentions of being a democratizing, educational space despite the troubled histories of colonialism and plunder that had built up its collections. The global resurgence of racism and xenophobia, exemplifed by the presidencies of Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, seemed to lend these concerns additional urgency.

It is in the crucible of this new global culture war that “New Power” was born. Consisting of large, loose sheets of paper, taped together and strung up throughout the high-ceilinged gallery in the north wing of the Palais de Tokyo’s lower level, the works transform a large open space into a sort of labyrinth. Overlapping and intersecting, the monumental surfaces form thin walls, at once delicate and impenetrable. The installation creates a compelling artistic metaphor for the barriers of structural discriminations (be they gendered, based on religion, or skin color). What the visitor seeks is often just out of reach or, at the very least, difficult to attain.

In addition to the disorientating spatial partitions, the suspended paintings commingle real visitors with painterly representations of various types of museumgoers, from school groups and couples to individuals and security guards. These personalities look at and interact with painted pastiches or silhouettes of famous works of art, many of which are recognizable contemporary art icons like Damien Hirst’s cruel A Thousand Years (1990), Anish Kapoor’s Descent Into Limbo (1992), or one of Lucio Fontana’s slashed Concetto spaziale works. Most, however, appear as anonymous rectangles of beige paper set into painted representations of ornate baroque frames. The particular type of paper used is called papel pardo and conveys an important double entendre: In Portuguese, pardo means “brown” and is a term still used today by the Brazilian census to designate Brazilians of “mixed race,” a vestige of the country’s complex colonial caste system.

Alexandre’s work is informed by his upbringing in ​​Rocinha, the largest favela in Brazil, located in a southern Rio de Janeiro suburb. In these most recent works, he uses the multiple meanings of papel pardo to address contemporary debates about identity and representation, lending his work a specifically activist, political orientation. Indeed, although the works in “New Power” may make heavy-handed allusions to art history, they really are about who is looking at art. The painted representations of visitors are all faceless, Black, and blonde-haired. As such, they seem to represent a fully mixed world, although hierarchies and power dynamics still appear to remain. Indeed, the security guards in Alexandre’s musée imaginaire are dressed like Brazil’s militarized state police force, collapsing the small margin of authority held by museum guards over visitors into the more repressive and expansive authority of the state.

Alexandre shared his intentions for the installation in a statement: “Pretos no topo (Blacks on top) has become a slogan of local rap,” he wrote. “I wanted to show its implication in contemporary art and highlight that that’s where the winners are because that’s where the intellectual capital is concentrated. It’s not just about money, but about controlling the narrative and the image. Occupying and controlling these spaces is the consequence of a powerful alliance. We (black people) must be attentive to these places designed so that we cannot see them. We must be physically present, attend openings, go to galleries and museums, learn about art, consume culture in all of its forms.”

The representation of people of color in art spaces has come a long way in the decades since Rasheed Araeen published “Preliminary Notes for a Black Manifesto” in the pages of Studio International in 1978. That said, Alexandre’s political conclusions, however well-intentioned, are less impressive than his aesthetic ones.

For a certain category of contemporary art of the variety that Alexandre alludes to in “New Power,” it’s not the mystique of a dense theoretical underpinning, but rather the impressive spectacle of obscene wealth that bestows these works with their aura. Art by the likes of Hirst and Jeff Koons have become highly legible to a mass audience and, as a result, lucratively marketable.

In an interview with Lux Magazine, Alexandre demonstrates his intimate understanding of these art market dynamics, even citing them as important formal influences on the “Pardo è Papel” series, of which “New Power” is only the most recent manifestation: “People want a souvenir, they do not want art. The collector should be educated in this sense. The acquisition of an art object is not only the expansion of his or her asset portfolio, but involves the responsibility to shelter that which has now become an asset of humankind. My large pieces of brown craft paper will get ripped and they will deteriorate in time.…Hopefully, the museologists and conservators will accept the challenge of preserving these works and gallerists will support less-formatted works, and collectors will start dealing with the need to collect things that are not permanent. There is nothing more contemporary than this.”