Philippe Cognée (Bilingual French - English)

Exhibition catalogue "Philippe Cognée" at the Musée de Grenoble (10 november 2012 - 3 february 2013), and at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Dole (9 march - 9 june 2013).

Philippe Cognée appeared on the art scene in the mid-1980s, with a figurative painting marked by primitivist overtones. In the early 1990s, he deeply questioned his  thinking and started to broaden his ideas.

Basing his work on an original pictorial technique, he developed a more complex research into painting and its relation to the photographic image. Underscoring the ambiguity of the visible, he contrasted the assertive objectivity of the photograph with the wavy quivering of a liquefied matter, challenging the very subject it is meant to represent.

As a painting of doubt, it turns out, paradoxically, to be an act of faith in art, alone capable of reinstating the contradictory fullness of reality.

The exhibition—the largest ever devoted to this artist—will bring together a hundred or so paintings, including the famous set titled Carcasses (2003), made up of 36 pictures. The show should help visitors to grasp the breadth and ambition of an oeuvre spanning more than two decades, and making Philippe Cognée one of today’s most important French painters.

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