FROM MAY 14 TO DECEMBER 30, 2020
Born in 1957 in Nantes, where he lives and works, Philippe Cognée is one of the most recognized artists of his generation. He was awarded the Villa Medici in 1990 and nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2004.
The artist executes his canvases with wax, heated and then crushed, producing on the textured surface a blurred effect that questions the exhaustion of the image as much as the human condition, with regard to its urban environment. From polaroids or photographs taken from his personal archives, the artist depicts abandoned urban or intimate places. In doing so, he pursues a reflection on the singular and the collective, the visible and the invisible, the territories of reality and those of art. His work also questions the role of painting in a society where the image, under the effects of new technologies, is both omnipresent and impoverished.
For the past twenty years, Philippe Cognée's research has led him to confront a crude and banal reality, made up of highways, suburbs, industrial slaughterhouses, supermarket shelves and recycling plants. He paints a singular portrait of our "marked out and elusive" reality, in the words of Guy Tosatto, director of the Grenoble museum.
It is his relationship to the landscape that is at the heart of the Chaumont-sur-Loire exhibition entitled Paysages révélés. Some thirty paintings presented in the galleries of the south and west wings of the Château will highlight wild or cultivated fields, brush, trees, forests, sometimes seen through the window of a train...
