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| Damien Deroubaix |
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For L.F.D.A. 02.In industry, a derrick is a huge metal tower used to support heavy drilling equipment over an oil well. For Damien Deroubaix, a derrick is above all a symbol of power, a structure used to extract “black gold” – the substance that drives the global economic machine – from the depths of the earth. Taken out of its original context and presented here in schematised form as part of the world of art, the structure takes on an even greater significance. The huge “derricks” created by Damien Deroubaix for La Force de l’Art 02 serve as monumental bases for sculptures by the artist-monstrous and terrifying like the powers to which they refer. We see an enlarged hippopotamus skull, a mosquito with the skull of a mountain antelope, long horns, swastika motifs, and a bird-woman with steely claws. The installation also includes a video clip by the American Death Metal group Six Feet Under, entitled “Amerika the Brutal”, creating a sound environment matching the violence of the ensemble as a whole. Apocalyptic metaphors of disaster and devouring, these elements interact with an ensemble of large paintings (Damien Deroubaix is above all a painter) featuring his favourite symbols of disaster, death and the afterlife, alluding – it seems – to the instruments of repression and propaganda prevalent in today’s world. Damien DeroubaixThe dark, even macabre irony of Damien Deroubaix’s imagery targets both our common sense or good taste as well as the violence of power in all its forms, be it political, economic or ideological. The artist, inspired as much by Matthias Grünewald, Picasso or John Heartfield as by Grindcore music, invents his own apocalyptic world, peopled with monstrous figures, symbols and allegories of Evil, that he scatters in large or small watercolours on papers, engravings, poker-work or transient constructions.[V. Th.] Damien Deroubaix was born in 1972 in Lille.
 Damien Deroubaix |
