A Place to Lose Oneself
The visual noise that Damien Deroubaix energetically orchestrates in his paintings, sculptures and woodcuts is overwhelming: brutal, deafening, sharp and dissonant. The release of energy that one feels through Deroubaix's work reveals the violence of the artist's gesture. We cannot encounter the work of Deroubaix without wondering where to focus our gaze, where to begin to look and what to make of the strange scenes that we see before our eyes. We are swallowed up by an orgy of detail - bestial figures, dismembered body parts, fragments of landscapes and scattered words offering snatches of meaning that we would like to hang on to.
Deroubaix's work has evolved over many years of intense practice, testing and pushing the possibilities of painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, print-making and most recently, woodcut. For his commission at Bloomberg SPACE, Deroubaix has conceived two major new works, drawing on the theme of temptation, which opens up a rich iconography. A large woodcut made from several panels draws the visitor into the gallery space. T (2010) takes as its inspiration the parable of Saint Anthony which details the mental and physical torments that he endured from supernatural forces whilst he crossed the desert. A popular theme in Western culture, the temptation of Saint Anthony is also the subject of the infamous triptych by Hieronymus Bosch (ca 1505), which in turn inspired French nineteenth century novelist Gustave Flaubert to write his own Temptation of Saint Anthony (published in 1874). Next to the carved wooden panels, a massive dead Chestnut tree constitutes the core of Deroubaix's imposing sculptural installation occupying the centre of the front gallery. Porteur de lumière (2010) immediately recalls yet another biblical parable, the original sin of Adam and Eve. However, the sculpture does not evoke Eden but undoubtedly Deroubaix's version of Hell where trees display 'fruits' made of women's heads and those of children with their skulls carved open exposing their brains. Adam, Eve and Saint Anthony constitute elements of narratives that produce fragments of images drowned in the whirlwind of Deroubaix's imagination. As fragments, they sit within a plethora of details, an excessive imagery that resists an overall coherence and transgresses iconographic traditions.
Through what has been described as a sort of meta-collage, Deroubaix juxtaposes within his own visual vocabulary images inspired by the history of art - from Bosch, Holbein and Goya to Max Ernst, Max Beckman and Francis Bacon - as well as elements borrowed from album covers and music videos, to create an extremely singular artistic vision. The dynamics of metamorphosis possess Deroubaix's nocturnal landscapes and figures. Neither human nor supernatural, they blur the boundaries between subject and object, life and death. The works' complex architectures often offer multiple vantage points reflecting a process of thought that cannot be grasped sequentially. It simultaneously brings together past, present and future, real memories and imaginary projections.
Deroubaix engages the viewer with his fascination for the image and his intensely physical relationship to the work. The feeling of desire that animates the work suggests an unreserved pleasure of seeing, an amplification of emotional tension comparable to the rush of adrenaline that propels people into states of trance during music concerts. Deroubaix1 is fascinated by various underground music genres, from punk and the different musical experiments that followed, such as Death Metal or Grindcore, ["The typical construction of their music is an influence for my paintings."] The velocity of the sound in Grindcore - "grind" directly refers to the speed of the music - represents the urgency of the political and social questions that obsessed the members of bands such as Birmingham-based Napalm Death (subject of the BBC documentary Thrash to Death in 1989). The music's velocity goes hand in hand with the growled lyrics which, despite their politically engaged nature, cannot be distinctly heard but rather are experienced as a loud roar.
The contradiction revealed in Grindcore's combination of politicised text and indistinct yowl echoes a similar effect in Deroubaix's work - identifiable references within a chaotic assemblage of images precluding any straightforward interpretation. The uproar and lack of meaning materialised in both Grindcore and Deroubaix's oeuvre mirror an overall critique of contemporary society. This critique points at a society lost in confusion, lacking a sense of purpose and humanity, dominated by the search for power and an endless hunger for money and commodities. In this context, through his work Deroubaix attempts to reflect society's dark underbelly of violence, by creating a nocturnal cathartic theatre, which offers the possibility for the purgation of the most extreme of emotions.
In Deroubaix's work the figural is in every way opposed to the discursive: the painting cannot be broken down into words and sentences. It resolutely resists the linguistic. Michel Leiris said that Francis Bacon's paintings are
among those that provoke obsession, in that the viewer wants, more than anything else, to find the painting's signification or significance. The question of signification is however more complex. How does a painting, or any artwork, signify? How does it translate into discourse? These questions may be common to the discussion of any work of art, yet they take on a singular urgency when we are confronted with Deroubaix's plethoric use of visual references, which solicit, in complex and intricate ways, different aspects of our collective and individual memories, and his unapologetic appropriation of the languages of politics, art history, popular culture and advertising. As Leiris suggested in relation to Bacon, we feel the compulsive need to decipher a message.
But to assert that the work carries no message is not to say that the work has no intention of aesthetic, political or ethical significance. It does not remove the responsibility of the artist in regard to his own work but is instead about proposing a different set of relationships between the work and discourse. In his essay To Destroy Painting, French theorist Louis Marin writes about Caravaggio's masterpiece The Head of Medusa stating that "Caravaggio's gesture regresses to a gesture of "origins", unique, of the indication, because it is not about, it cannot be about, transmitting a message, expressing a story through its narrative: it is about imprinting by contact an emotional effect in the instant - instantaneous in its violence."2 Marin's analysis of the painting by Caravaggio intends to articulate what he sees as a radical change in the idea of representation in historical painting. Caravaggio no longer represents an event in its narrative dimension, but creates the conditions of an experience, an actual event in the space of the painting. This event is similar in its force and instantaneity to that of a shock or an accident. Deroubaix intentionally provokes a similar effect in his work. He does not intend to create the illusion of reality through depth and perspective in these troubled scenes. They not only escape realistic depiction and abstraction but seem to renounce the possibility, as well as the relevance, of representation. It is as if the painting (or sculpture, or woodcut) equates to a scream or a bark. The spoken quality of the painting is literally referred to through the speech bubbles that appear in Deroubaix's works, for example the bats in Porteur de lumiére (2010) carry the word "Revocate" across the installation.
This spoken quality of Deroubaix's paintings and installations radically disturbs any attempt at the interpretation of the work for they speak for themselves and confront us with the very question of how meaning is prescribed. In his essay titled The Mystic Fable3, Michel de Certeau draws a parallel between the spoken quality of language in fables and Bosch's painting The Garden of Delights, therefore confronting it with the written nature of art historical discourse. The orality of Bosch's oeuvre - and in turn Deroubaix's - points to a register of discourse that is dispersed and incoherent; one that aesthetically conveys a loss of meaning through that dispersal. In Deroubaix's work, and particularly in the new works commissioned for Bloomberg SPACE, this idea of the margins of language is omnipresent, symbolised in the artist's almost exclusive use of animals, skeletons, women and children - when men appear, they are either decapitated or being tortured. The subjects who speak are fallen members of society or fantastic creatures, concealing or erasing, in a process of masquerade, the real subject of speech - the figure of Saint Anthony in T appears as a large black mass surrounded by microphones. Deroubaix's canvases are not white pages that lend themselves easily to the written word, they display a black background as "a represented space that expulses outside itself, outside its surface, the objects that the painter would like to introduce"4. The black space in Deroubaix's work is not only depicted through the black backgrounds of his paintings, it is also metaphorically suggested through his use of blackened light bulbs or unplugged microphones, in both cases tools unable to perform their function. Excessive velocity of sound becomes inaudible to the point of silence, the disquieting silence that fills the void of the abyss. Within this silent noise, Deroubaix's bestial figures and dismembered bodies in various states of transformation cross the stage of the canvas only to flow beyond its limits and escape.
Vanessa Desclaux
Vanessa Desclaux is a curator based in London.
1Interview Damien Deroubaix with Jerome Lefevre, C.S., 2009.
2Louis Marin, Détruire la peinture, 1997 (1977), Editions Flammarion, page 206 (my translation).
3Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume one, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, translated by Michael B. Smith, 1992 (1982), The University of Chicago Press
4Louis Marin, Détruire la peinture, 1997 (1977), Editions Flammarion, page 201 (my translation)