Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs! It’s time to talk about an artist who makes the demons of our time dance with rare intensity. Damien Deroubaix is not just a painter, a printmaker, or a sculptor – he is a visual exorcist who extracts the monsters from our collective unconscious to make them parade on his canvases in a contemporary dance of death. My successive encounters with the artist, in Paris and at the Nosbaum Reding gallery in Luxembourg, have only confirmed this first impression. The voracious passion with which he talks about his work, his unique way of weaving dizzying links between Dürer’s engravings, metal music, and medieval dances of death, his way of deconstructing each image to reveal the hidden layers – all this has imprinted in my mind a vision of art that has not left me. These encounters have transformed my way of looking not only at his work but at art in general.
In his studio between Paris and Meisenthal in the East of France, Deroubaix orchestrates a grotesque ballet where medieval skeletons rub shoulders with translucent octopuses, where Rembrandt’s emaciated trees intertwine with logos of metal bands. His works are visual testimonies where each layer reveals a new stratum of our cultural history, as if the artist had embarked on an archaeological dig of our collective psyche.
Take his monumental work “World Downfall” from 2014 (268 x 410 cm), a tapestry in three panels assembled with lace additions, Lunéville embroideries, horsehide, and fabric appliqué: The figures contort in a hellish choreography, strangely reminiscent of the dances of death from the Middle Ages. But Deroubaix is not a mere nostalgic – he transmutes these historical references into something viscerally contemporary. The grimacing skulls wear headphones, the skeletons brandish smartphones, and the demons sport logos of multinational corporations.
This is precisely where Deroubaix’s genius resides: in his ability to create dizzying temporal bridges between eras. He draws from the history of art with the voracity of a Chronos devouring his children, but what he regurgitates is invariably transformed, metamorphosed by his sharp gaze on our time. The 17th-century vanities become under his brush acid meditations on our consumer society.
His work echoes the theories of philosopher Walter Benjamin on history and collective memory. For Benjamin, the past is not a simple chronological succession of events, but rather a constellation of images and moments that illuminate one another, creating unexpected connections across time. This is exactly what Deroubaix does in his kaleidoscopic compositions.
In “Das große Glück,” a monumental woodcut from 2008, Deroubaix takes up the iconography of Dürer’s Nemesis to create a contemporary allegory of power. The winged divinity, whose feathers are rendered with an obsessive precision reminiscent of the German master, is hybridized with Artemis of Ephesus with her multiple breasts. This anachronistic fusion creates a monstrous figure that perfectly embodies Benjamin’s vision of history as a temporal constellation.
The exhibition “On a day so dark” at the National Library of France (BnF), which has just concluded, pushes this dialogue with history even further. There, Deroubaix confronts his works with the treasures of the print cabinet, creating visual resonances that cross centuries. An engraving by Rembrandt finds its echo in a contemporary installation, a detail from Dürer resurges in a monumental painting. These juxtapositions are not mere exercises in style – they reveal the secret continuities that link our time to those that preceded it.
The figure of the octopus, recurrent in his recent works, perfectly illustrates this approach. In “Time” (2021), the cephalopod battles with a skeleton in a strange aquatic waltz. This protean creature becomes under his brush an ambiguous symbol of passing time, of adaptive intelligence, but also of our troubled relationship with nature. The choreographed battle between the mollusk and the skeleton evokes Dürer’s engravings but seen through the prism of our contemporary ecological anxiety.
His use of text in his works is particularly interesting. The words floating in his compositions are not mere legends or comments – they are an integral part of the image, much like in medieval manuscripts. “Life,” “Time,” “Death” – these simple words become fully-fledged actors in his visual dramas, creating semantic bridges between the different elements of the composition.
This approach recalls Benjamin’s theory of translation, where meaning emerges not from the simple transmission of a message but from the gaps and resonances between languages. Deroubaix constantly translates between different visual vocabularies – from the medieval to the contemporary, from the sacred to the profane, from the historical to the personal. Each visual translation creates new constellations of meaning, new ways of understanding our relationship to time and history.
In “Homo Bulla,” a spectacular installation created at the International Glass Art Center of Meisenthal, glass bubbles engraved with macabre patterns float in space like planets in a mortuary solar system. Each sphere is engraved with figures from 15th-century dances of death, but their arrangement in space creates a contemporary choreography that evokes both minimalist installations and metal album covers.
The series “El origen del Mundo,” a set of twenty-five etchings, pushes this exploration of temporal layers even further. Each engraving is a microcosm where historical references telescope with our present. The figures seem to emerge from the depths of the paper like specters summoned during a visual spirit session. The very title of the series, which references Courbet’s famous painting, adds an extra layer of meaning to this temporal entanglement.
Violence is omnipresent in his work, but it is never gratuitous. It is a systemic, structural violence, that of our contemporary world seen through the filter of art history. In “Gott mit uns” (2011), a monumental installation composed of engraved wooden panels and animal skulls, Deroubaix creates a chilling dialogue between the motifs of medieval dances of death and the iconography of modern conflicts.
His use of printmaking is particularly significant in this context. This ancestral technique becomes in his hands a tool of resistance against the proliferation of digital images. His monumental woodcuts are like scars in the fabric of our saturated visual culture, physical reminders of the materiality of art. The very process of engraving, with its repetitive gestures and controlled violence, becomes a metaphor for our relationship to history.
In “Garage Days Re-visited” (2016), a monumental work created in response to Picasso’s Guernica, Deroubaix pushes this logic to its extreme. The large engraved and inked wooden panels are not printed but directly exhibited, transforming the matrices into autonomous works. This radical decision emphasizes the materiality of the artistic process while creating a complex dialogue with the history of art.
The reference to Guernica is not incidental – it is this work, viewed in tapestry form at an exhibition in Arles in 1991, that triggered Deroubaix’s artistic vocation. This foundational moment illustrates perfectly Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image, where the past and the present meet in a flash of mutual recognition.
His exhibition “Headbangers Ball” at the Modern Art Museum of Saint-Etienne also illustrates this synthesis very well. The references to metal music intermingle with citations from art history in a deafening visual symphony. The heads seem to sway as if following the rhythm of an imaginary metal music, creating a contemporary dance of death. This exhibition reveals how Deroubaix manages to merge seemingly incompatible references into a coherent vision of our time.
The way he treats space in his installations is also revelatory. In “Orpheus’ Suitcase” at the Museum of Hunting and Nature in Paris, the works create immersive environments where the viewer is invited to navigate between different temporalities. The reconstruction of a primitive cave rubs shoulders with brightly colored paintings and large-format wood engravings, creating a temporal labyrinth where each turn reveals a new constellation of meaning.
The influence of Benjamin is particularly felt in the way Deroubaix treats the notion of progress. For both the philosopher and the artist, progress is not a triumphant march forward, but rather an accumulation of ruins that the angel of history contemplates with horror. Deroubaix’s compositions, with their fragments of history colliding, perfectly embody this vision.
In “Der Schlaf der Vernunft” (2011), Deroubaix creates an installation that directly references Goya’s “Caprices” while incorporating elements of contemporary culture. The monsters that haunt the sleep of reason are no longer just fantastic creatures – they are the very real demons of our time: environmental destruction, systemic violence, digital alienation.
What makes Deroubaix’s work so relevant today is that he creates art that is deeply rooted in history and decidedly contemporary. He does not simply cite the past – he reactivates it, making it dialogue urgently and necessarily with our present. His works are like time machines that allow us to see our time through the prism of history.
In “Tina’s Daughter” (2015), a painting referencing Margaret Thatcher’s famous slogan “There Is No Alternative,” Deroubaix creates a complex allegory of contemporary capitalism. Horses with sharpened teeth gather around a bonfire, while the letters “A NN AA” float above the scene, simultaneously referring to triple A financial ratings and the Nazi decree “Nacht und Nebel.” This condensation of historical and contemporary references creates a powerful image of the economic violence of our time.
What is particularly impressive in Deroubaix’s work is that he maintains aesthetic coherence despite the diversity of his references. Whether he works with engraving, painting, tapestry, or glass, his visual language remains recognizable. It is a language that simultaneously speaks of our past and our present, allowing us to see the continuities and ruptures in our cultural history.
The monsters that populate his canvases are not simply fantastic creatures – they are manifestations of our own demons, our collective fears, our contemporary anxieties. In “EA Lord of the Depths” (2011), a monumental woodcut depicting a Mesopotamian divinity hybridized with contemporary elements, Deroubaix creates an image that transcends time, connecting our ancestral fears to our modern anxieties.
His work reminds us that art is not simply a matter of aesthetics or technique, but a way of thinking about the world and our place in it. Through his constant dialogue with art history, his reappropriation of traditional techniques, and his sharp vision of our time, Deroubaix creates an art that is both rooted and radical, historical and contemporary.
While contemporary art often seems disconnected from history, Deroubaix’s work reminds us of the vital importance of maintaining this dialogue with the past. Not out of mere nostalgia or erudition, but because it is only by understanding where we come from that we can understand where we are going. His works are temporal compasses that help us navigate the murky waters of our present, while reminding us that the monsters of yesterday are still among us, simply dressed differently.
