Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, if you have not yet plunged into the universe of Antoine Roegiers, get ready for a visual slap that will awaken you from your aesthetic stupor! This Belgian by birth, French by adoption, is not just a painter – he is a storyteller, a director, a visual pyromaniac who ignites our sleeping consciences.
Graduating from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2007, Roegiers immediately distinguished himself, not by trying to reinvent the wheel, but by excavating in the fertile ground of art history with refreshing boldness. He understood, unlike so many contemporary artists obsessed with the idea of novelty at all costs, that dialoguing with masters of the past can be the most radical form of innovation.
What I find particularly brilliant about Roegiers is that he transforms our nostalgia for narrative painting into something undeniably contemporary. His large canvases, including those presented in his exhibition “The Great Parade” at the Templon gallery in Paris in 2024, are not mere tributes to Flemish masters – they are distorting mirrors of our own decaying society.
Look at his fiery skies, his packs of stray dogs, his masked characters parading, indifferent to the crumbling world around them. Isn’t this the perfect metaphor for our time, where we continue our absurd parades while the planet burns? In his painting “The Melancholy of the Deserter”, a barely veiled self-portrait, Roegiers presents himself as a disoriented man who dared to extricate himself from the collective procession. This image resonates as a personal manifesto questioning our own ability to step out of line.
There is something about Roegiers that reminds me of baroque theatricality, but viewed through the prism of great contemporary anxieties. His work is part of a long theatrical tradition, one that dates back to medieval mysteries and reaches its peak in the baroque theater of the seventeenth century. The baroque theater, with its taste for illusion, metamorphoses, and instability, provides a fascinating parallel with Roegiers’ work[1].
The baroque theater was characterized by its fascination with masks and disguises, elements that are omnipresent in Roegiers’ canvases. “The Burning of Awakening”, his exhibition at Templon in Brussels in 2023, precisely presented skeletons collecting masks abandoned by humans. In the baroque tradition, the mask was both a tool of disguise and a revealer of truth – a duality that Roegiers explores with biting intelligence. As Jean Rousset wrote in his book “The Literature of the Baroque Age in France”: “The mask is both lie and truth; it conceals to better reveal”[2].
In the baroque theater, the boundary between illusion and reality was constantly blurred, just as in Roegiers’ paintings where masked characters evolve in landscapes halfway between dream and nightmare. This aesthetic of instability and metamorphosis, so characteristic of the baroque, finds a striking contemporary resonance in Roegiers’ work.
Baroque scenography, with its sophisticated machines enabling on-stage transformations and spectacular effects, echoes the way Roegiers composes his canvases, creating impossible spaces where scales and perspectives seem to obey a dreamy rather than physical logic. Let us not forget that Roegiers has also made animated films, transposing this taste for movement and transformation into a medium that literally brings still images to life.
The baroque theater was also haunted by the awareness of the fleetingness of existence – the famous “memento mori” – a theme that Roegiers explores through his representations of destructive fires and post-apocalyptic landscapes. His paintings remind us, just as Calderón de la Barca’s theater did with “Life is a Dream” (1635), that the certainties on which we build our lives can vanish in an instant[3].
The notion of “theatrum mundi” – the world as theater – so central to baroque thought, finds a striking expression in Roegiers’ pictorial stagings. His characters all seem to play a role in a great cosmic farce of which they are unaware. This vision of the world as a vast performance orchestrated by forces beyond us is perfectly illustrated in “The Great Parade”, where masked musicians pursue their senseless procession in a devastated landscape.
The baroque theater also loved playing with violent contrasts – light and shadow, life and death, beauty and ugliness – an approach that Roegiers adopts brilliantly. His paintings often juxtapose the formal beauty of his pictorial technique with the horror of what he depicts, creating this aesthetic tension so characteristic of the baroque.
The very structure of his narrative project, this endless story he has been developing since 2018, evokes the great baroque theatrical cycles, those spectacles that could unfold over several days, weaving complex and interconnected narratives. As the artist explains himself: “It’s a continuous reverie; the paintings are linked and flow into one another to form a coherent whole in my view: a free narrative thread with a variable and endless chronology”[4].
This theatrical dimension also manifests itself in the way Roegiers uses color. His fiery skies, blood reds, and deep blacks evoke the dramatic lighting of baroque theater, where light was used to create powerful emotional effects. There is something profoundly scenographic in his way of conceiving pictorial space.
But don’t be fooled: Roegiers is not a mere nostalgic recycling past aesthetics. What makes his work so impactful is his ability to use these historical references to speak directly about our present. His paintings are like baroque theatrical productions rewritten to address the anxieties of the twenty-first century – climate change, social alienation, the loss of collective meaning.
The great baroque theorist Eugenio d’Ors saw in this sensibility not just a historically situated movement but a constant that reappears in various times of crisis and transformation[5]. In this sense, Roegiers is profoundly baroque – not because he stylistically imitates this period, but because he captures its anxious, metamorphic spirit at a moment when our own age once again seems characterized by instability and uncertainty.
The masks in Roegiers’ work are particularly interesting. In “The Burning of Awakening”, these abandoned masks that skeletons collect represent the artifice that humans have built around themselves. This is precisely what the baroque theater sought to unveil – the illusory nature of social appearances. Did not the playwright Tirso de Molina say that “life is a comedy, and the world is a theater where everyone plays their masked role”[6]?
But there is also in Roegiers a sharp awareness of the limits of representation itself – another theme dear to the baroque. When he reinterprets the works of Bosch or Brueghel, he does not simply quote them; he animates them, deconstructs them, reinvents them. In doing so, he reminds us that all representation is a construction, an artifice – just like the baroque theater which, paradoxically, used the most elaborate artifices to question the illusory nature of the world.
Observe how, in his early video works like “The Seven Deadly Sins”, Roegiers dissects Brueghel’s paintings, isolating each element to then recombine them into animated sequences. This approach recalls the “theater within theater” procedure so cherished by baroque playwrights, this mise en abyme that reveals the mechanisms of illusion while plunging us deeper into it.
The spectacular dimension of baroque also finds an echo in the way Roegiers designs his exhibitions as immersive experiences. Upon entering a room presenting his works, one is struck by the same sensation that the spectators of great baroque spectacles must have experienced – that of being transported into a parallel universe that, while clearly artificial, nonetheless speaks to us of profound truths.
The baroque theater was obsessed with sudden turnarounds of situation, the plot twists that disrupt the established order. Roegiers’ apocalyptic fires, which radically transform landscapes, function as such visual plot twists. They embody this “aesthetic of surprise” that Walter Benjamin identified as central to the baroque allegory[7].
It is striking to see how Roegiers, in “The Great Parade”, subverts the codes of the triumphant procession – another recurring motif of baroque theater – to make it an expression of collective absurdity. His masked musicians, marching in step in a ruined world, evoke those characters from baroque theater who pursue their futile intrigues, unaware of the imminent disaster.
This tension between consciousness and unconsciousness is at the heart of Roegiers’ work. His masked characters seem trapped in their roles, unable to see the reality surrounding them, while the artist – and we by extension – observe their parade with a mix of fascination and dread. This is exactly the kind of uncomfortable position that baroque theater loved to place its spectators in.
The motif of the eclipse, present in “The Great Parade”, is particularly revealing of this baroque sensibility. In baroque theater, celestial phenomena were often used as metaphors for earthly upheavals. The eclipse, in Roegiers’ work, reminds us, as he says himself, that “we are just a small confetti in this vast universe”[8]. This awareness of our cosmic insignificance was precisely what baroque theater sought to awaken in its audience.
The figure of the deserter, represented by Roegiers in his self-portrait, evokes those characters from baroque theater who, suddenly enlightened about the illusory nature of the world, find themselves isolated in their lucidity. Like Sigismund from Calderón, questioning whether life is but a dream, Roegiers’ deserter appears disoriented by his own awareness.
Another aspect of Roegiers’ work that resonates with baroque aesthetics is his interest in grotesque and hybrid figures. The fantastic creatures that populate his canvases, inherited in part from Bosch and Brueghel but reinvented for our time, recall the monstrous characters that appeared in the comic interludes of baroque tragedies. These liminal figures embodied the fundamental ambivalence of the baroque, its fascination with limits and transgressions.
The baroque theater was also characterized by its taste for accumulation and visual saturation – an aesthetic that Roegiers adopts in his lush compositions where every square inch of the canvas seems alive and meaningful. This horror vacui, this fear of emptiness that drives one to fill all available space, creates a dizzying effect similar to what baroque directors sought.
But what truly sets Roegiers apart is that he makes this baroque aesthetic not an end in itself, but a means to speak about our present with unyielding urgency. His fires are not mere spectacular effects – they are the visual manifestations of the ecological crises we are facing. His masked characters are not just picturesque figures – they are emblems of our own collective inability to confront reality.
In this sense, Roegiers accomplishes what the best baroque theater sought to do: use the most elaborate artifices to confront us with the most essential truths. As Jean Rousset wrote, “the baroque makes instability a principle of organization”[9] – a description that perfectly applies to how Roegiers structures his pictorial narratives.
There is something profoundly theatrical in the way Roegiers conceives of painting itself. For him, as he explains, painting is “exploring a world that does not exist and giving it body”[10] – a definition that could equally apply to the art of a theater director. Each painting becomes a scene, each exhibition an act in a larger play that unfolds over the years.
This performative dimension is further reinforced by the fact that Roegiers literally stages himself in some of his works. His self-portrait as a deserter is reminiscent of those moments of baroque theater when the author breaks the fourth wall to directly address the audience, creating an effect of distancing that paradoxically enhances the emotional impact of the work.
I am particularly struck by the way Roegiers uses humor in his darkest compositions – another characteristic trait of baroque theater, which loved to intertwine the comic and the tragic. His bewildered dogs observing the human parade introduce an element of comedy into an otherwise apocalyptic painting. This juxtaposition creates a complex emotional tension that baroque theater also sought.
What makes Roegiers’ work strong is that he revives for our time this baroque sensibility that thrived precisely in periods of crisis and uncertainty similar to ours. As Heinrich Wölfflin wrote, “the baroque expresses not perfection and accomplishment, but movement and becoming”[11] – a description that perfectly captures the dynamic and processual nature of Roegiers’ narrative project.
Through his fiery canvases and masked characters, Roegiers invites us to recognize that we may ourselves be living in a new baroque era – a time where certainties collapse, where appearances deceive, and where the boundary between the real and the illusory becomes increasingly porous. His work holds up a theatrical mirror in which we can contemplate our own absurd parade.
The next time you find yourself facing one of his works, do not simply admire its impeccable technique or historical references. Instead, let yourself be carried away by the visual drama unfolding before your eyes, accept to be both seduced and destabilized, just as the spectators of the great baroque spectacles were. For it is precisely in this tension between fascination and discomfort that the subversive power of Roegiers’ art resides.
In a contemporary art world often obsessed with over-deconstruction and conceptualization, Roegiers dares to embrace narration, spectacle, emotion – not to offer us a comfortable refuge in nostalgia, but to better confront us with the contradictions and crises of our present. In this, he is not only the heir of the great Flemish masters but also one of the most relevant painters of our time.
As our world literally and metaphorically burns, we need artists like Roegiers to hold up a theatrical mirror in which we can contemplate our own collective absurdity. For as his enigmatic and flamboyant paintings suggest, perhaps the only sensible response to the apocalypse is to continue our parade, but with full awareness of its derisive nature.
- Jean Rousset, The Literature of the Baroque Age in France, José Corti, 1954.
- Ibid.
- Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Life is a Dream, 1635, trans. Bernard Sesé, Flammarion, 1992.
- Antoine Roegiers, quoted in the press kit for the exhibition “The Burning of Awakening”, Templon Gallery, Brussels, 2023.
- Eugenio d’Ors, On the Baroque, Gallimard, 1935, trans. Agathe Rouart-Valéry, 1968.
- Tirso de Molina, The Shy One in the Palace, 1611, cited by Jean-Pierre Cavaillé in Baroque, Honoré Champion, 2019.
- Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Baroque Drama, 1928, trans. Sibylle Muller, Flammarion, 1985.
- Antoine Roegiers, quoted in the press kit for the exhibition “The Great Parade”, Templon Gallery, Paris, 2024.
- Jean Rousset, op. cit.
- Antoine Roegiers, quoted in the press kit for the exhibition “The Burning of Awakening”, Templon Gallery, Brussels, 2023.
- Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, 1888, trans. Guy Ballangé, Gérard Monfort, 1985.
