Philippe Cognée: Portraits - solo show

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.

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. »

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.

“Portraits”, a solo exhibition by Philippe Cognée to be discovered at Oniris gallery from June 14 to September 20, 2025