The infernal Damien Deroubaix displays on the BNF | EUROtoday

DUpon coming into, it strikes you: a sphinx, a mermaid or a harpy, we do not actually know. She seems to be at you, wings and claws outstretched, jaws clenched, a cluster of breasts on her chest just like theArtemis of Ephesus. Next to it, a skeleton with two heads, every linked to a tree that appears taken from a Rembrandt.

Two giant codecs in highly effective black and white set the tone for the universe of an artist who desires to unite the visible grammar of dying metallic and the etchings of Holbein, the octopus Cthulhu of Lovecraft and The Woman by Edvard Munch, or the road artwork collage and the vanitas of Hans Baldung in a fiercely aesthetic Sabbath-like spherical. In these occasions of apocalypse, right here is Eros and Thanatos reunited once more, however for the higher!

Damien Deroubaix, French artist born in 1972 in Lille, displays his prints (and a few work and sculptures) within the Mansart gallery of the BNF in dialogue, as they are saying, with the masterpieces of engraving preserved by the establishment . Little is thought about it, nevertheless it homes, along with treasured books and manuscripts, an actual treasure, significantly graphic.

Small totems

So we delight within the conflict between the Nemesis by Dürer and its model by Deroubaix, who even appears to have torn off a wing to raised sculpt it in lime wooden, positioned on the ground within the exhibition. Or Goya’s Luciferian goats, in El Sueno, who eye the 4 biblical horsemen reinterpreted by Deroubaix, from the Middle Ages or from a Slayer file cowl.

The emblematic motifs of the Picasso interval Guernica additionally abound at Deroubaix, reworked by the artist, who, at a really younger age, cast his vocation in entrance of a tapestry reproducing Malaguène’s masterpiece on the bombing of the Basque metropolis.

Deroubaix, a case within the modern panorama, makes use of “secular techniques involving a physical confrontation with materials”, enthuses the curator of the exhibition, Cécile Pocheau-Lesteven, accountable for the BNF’s print collections.

To Discover



Kangaroo of the day

Answer

Very bodily, in reality, like these unusual little totems that he calls “storytelling sticks” and which dot the exhibition. Carved in wooden and depicting ladies, bats or octopuses, this time they evoke the world of shamans or that, insular and wild, of Paul Gauguin, making Deroubaix an artist who feeds on others to develop into himself. -even, trustworthy to Manet’s phrases: “When I have my hands in my pockets, I cross the fingers of thousands of painters. »

“In such a dark day”exhibition by Damien Deroubaix (catalogue, 128 p., €35, BNF Éditions). Meet on the BNF Richelieu, 5, rue Vivienne, in Paris (2^e), till February 16, 2025.