This was a very painful one. Not logistically. Although we had to pull two large paintings from the street all the way up to the third floor for the first time, and yes, that was only the first sign of what would become a strangely chilling experience.

The real pain came when the exhibition ended. When it was time to separate ourselves from the paintings. For a few days the wall remained empty, but more than that, our universe suddenly felt incomplete, as if someone had quietly removed an entire mythology from our daily life. We had grown used to waking up, having dinner, reading, and talking beneath the intricate, overwhelming world Damien had built. Then, overnight, it was gone.

Living with a Damien Deroubaix painting is unlike living with almost any other work. Every morning another face appears. Heads emerge from the dense composition, solemn, grotesque, human, spectral ; staring back with an unsettling calm. From some of them, other figures seem to unfold, as if thought itself were breaking into bodies. In one corner, a plant erupts from a vase with vitality, overtaking the space like something half-natural, half-hallucinated. Around it, brilliant, almost electric colours explode across the surface: deep reds, luminous blues, acidic yellows, vibrant greens. They carry energy, making even the darkest imagery pulse with life.

Every day another symbol revealed itself, another collision between beauty and catastrophe. Medieval demons stand beside fragments of Picasso, death-metal iconography brushes against Renaissance ghosts, mythology meets contemporary violence. Nothing feels quoted. Everything feels alive.

His paintings seem to know that the world has always been on the edge of collapse. They are never nihilistic. They are dense, furious, profoundly intelligent constructions where every centimeter insists on being seen.

The painting slowly became another room in the apartment. It watched us as much as we watched it. Friends would stop talking mid-sentence, pulled into one small corner before discovering another. It was inexhaustible.

Some exhibitions leave memories. Damien's left an absence. And even now, years later, I still catch myself imagining those impossible paintings hanging on the wall again, waiting to reveal something I had somehow missed.

Text by Patrick Steffen