Philippe Cognée

Overview

As part of the Exporama Rennes 2025 program, galerie Oniris is pleased to present an exhibition dedicated to one of the major axes of Philippe Cognée's work: portrait and self- portrait. Far from the classic codes of the genre, this work questions the human condition in its fragility, its flesh and its disappearance.

Since the 1990s, Cognée has been developing a singular body of work based on the image, particularly the photographic image. He takes its mechanisms - framing, focusing, blurring, instantaneity - and reinterprets them in an experimental pictorial process, based on a heated encaustic technique. This warm, shifting, unstable material paves the way for a style of painting that does not imitate photography, but rather pushes its effects to the point of disturbance.

« Painting is only an illusion, that's what interests me. [...] I need to verify reality, to bring it back and then verify it by painting it, by mistreating it to make something else of it. A second reality. » P.C.

For Cognée, the human figure is a subject for metamorphosis. He seeks neither resemblance nor narrative, but what he calls “the residual image” - that fragile trace, on the verge of disappearance, where something essential remains. « Portraiture is the possibility of going as far as possible to keep the residual image somewhere. »

Whether he's working on anonymous portraits, those of family and friends, or historical figures from the history of art, Cognée applies the same protocol: he takes an image from reality, destructures it, liquefies it, until it wavers in a zone of visual uncertainty. The viewer is no longer faced with a figure, but with an imprint - a face as visual memory or furtive perception.

The self-portrait occupies a central place in this reflection. Cognée does not engage in psychological introspection, but in a physical confrontation with the support, the material and the gaze. Painting himself is an act of radicalism: « I deformed people so much that they weren't very happy. In the end, I painted myself; I couldn't complain. »

For Cognée, representing oneself means questioning presence and incarnation, sometimes to the point of assumed animality. The body becomes an indistinct form, a mass of heated wax, a material in tension, traversed by pictorial accidents: drips, tears, visual scars. Painting here is an operation of voluntary loss - a process that weakens the image to intensify its affective power. « I'm particularly interested in imprecision. The fact of erasing signs makes it easier for the imagination to enter the picture. »

Positioned between figuration and abstraction, between memory and erasure, these portraits impose a new reading of the genre: they do not assert an identity, but pose the radical question of its persistence. This exhibition offers an opportunity to discover or rediscover the formal and conceptual richness of this part of Philippe Cognée's oeuvre. By placing the human figure at the heart of a painting of disorder, he confronts us with what art can still say about the image, the body and the gaze.