Guided tour of the exhibition of Philippe Cognée, le réel sublimé
Philippe Cognée is a pioneer of the revival of figuration and one of the major artists of the contemporary French art scene. His painting, of a deep singularity, knows at the turn of the 1990s a radical change, carried by the use of photography and by the recourse to an ancestral technique, the painting with wax, that he exploits in all his plastic capacities and plays with virtuosity. Philippe Cognée does not tell a story, he draws a portrait of the very personal contemporary world in which our gaze is invited to wander.
Through some forty paintings made over the last thirty years, this exhibition offers to see not as a retrospective, but as an anthology of works chosen from three recurring themes in his career: nature, architecture and human figure.