Philippe Cognée: "We always paint afterwards, and from afterwards...".

About the three exhibitions devoted to Philippe Cognée in 2023, at the Musée de Tessé in Le Mans, the Musée de l'Orangerie and the Musée Bourdelle in Paris.

Philippe Cognée's work is hard to miss this year... and all the better for it! No fewer than three major exhibitions in Paris and Le Mans are devoted to this painter, engraver and draughtsman, who was born in Loire-Atlantique in 1957 and has become one of the leading figures on the French contemporary art scene. He is best known for his encaustic paintings, which he uses to dissolve the elements depicted in the paint using an iron. Philippe Cognée is the first artist invited to take over the rooms of the Musée de Tessé, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Le Mans, with a group of works produced over the last thirty years and grouped around three of the main themes that underpin his approach: nature, architecture and the figure. His works tell no story. The fruit of both desire and chance, his powerful and singular art is demanded by reality, of which he gives us a sublimated vision. Hence the title of this exhibition at Le Mans, which dedicates its entire 2023 season to contemporary art: "Philippe Cognée. Le réel sublimé". On view until 5 November.

"To remove the sharpness of the subject is to open up the field of imagination and memory," says Philippe Cognée. His beginnings, in the 1980s, were not quite there yet, and he dubbed his work "the African period" because his works of art for sale were so marked by a very physical, materialist dimension. "Whether in painting or sculpture, working in oil or wood, his work was raw, grainy and rough. A violent gesture attacks the support, playing with the marks left by the tool, like the axe or the chainsaw", writes Amélie Adamo in the June issue of L'Oeil magazine. "There is a primitivist power in this work on the skin of the work, attacked head-on and brutally, that owes as much to Africa, where the artist lived, as to Western art, from Antoine Bourdelle to Georg Baselitz, via A.R. Penck.

Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1922) is Philippe Cognée's tutelary figure. To mark its reopening on 15 March 2023, the Musée Bourdelle has chosen to devote its most important retrospective in Paris to Philippe Cognée. Held in the wing designed by Christian de Portzamparc, the exhibition "Philippe Cognée. La peinture d'après" can still be seen until 16 July. It revolves around the Basel Catalogue, a dizzying array of works produced between 2013 and 2015. It comprises around a thousand works produced according to the same protocol: the artist, after tearing out pages from the Art Basel catalogues, paints a copy of and on top of a reproduction of a work - by Jeff Koons, Pablo Picasso or Alberto Giacometti, or by a less famous or even forgotten artist. This 'repainting', which follows the exact format of the photographic reproduction it covers, combines a disappearance and an appearance in a single gesture and movement.

Mounted on aluminium, these works are presented side by side in a long labyrinth, forming a hypnotic frieze. Like photograms, they form a shot or a tracking shot. This crucial project is preceded by a long introductory sequence, which demonstrates the pre-existence and anchoring of major notions in the artist's work: 'repainting' and formal proliferation. Paintings and sculptures are a reminder of the extent to which, since the 1980s, Philippe Cognée has been exploring the overlaying of paint, optical saturation and the legacy of his elders - Velázquez, Ingres and Rubens. The artist is well aware of this: we always paint after, and from after. Finally, a large room, as if trapped in the labyrinth, forms the third sequence of this exhibition at the Musée Bourdelle: while a Bull's Head (1989) - an archaic sculpture evoking the Minotaur - faces Bourdelle's Great Tragic Mask (1901), the picture rails host six monumental, never-before-seen canvases pairing the flower with the sculpture: aren't both traversed by the same vitalist sap, by the same principle of germination? The painter and the sculptor are in constant dialogue in Philippe Cognée, and he in turn is in constant dialogue with his peers.

The landscape is a recurring theme in Philippe Cognée's work, and has been constantly reinvented through his pictorial treatments, displaying a plastic richness that can be seen in the exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie until 4 September. Three large vertical landscapes - his famous Broussailles, inspired by his travels in Namibia, and impenetrable brambles - contrast majestically with the horizontal expanses of Claude Monet. And following on from the snow-covered forests he painted, on the verge of abstraction, after a train journey through Switzerland, Philippe Cognée has created an original monumental painting that echoes Claude Monet's views of Giverny in winter.

In the 1990s, he abandoned fiction and mythology to take a closer look at the world around him. "The artist was undoubtedly nourished by the literature of Michel Houellebecq," says Amélie Adamo. He began to take a disillusioned but scientifically precise look at everyday objects and the technical aspects of the industrial world, to which we usually pay no attention. It was from 1992 onwards that he explored a new direction. In fact, his 2001 Self-portrait is so reminiscent of Bacon that you can't help but think of him... The Daniel Templon art gallery, which still represents him, gave Philippe Cognée his first solo exhibition in 2003.

 "The rough surface is smoothed by the use of a new protocol: painting with beeswax and coloured pigments from a photograph, on canvas, then ironing it through a rhodoïd film that crushes the material, diluting it, erasing it and blurring the sharpness of the subject. There is a gestural distancing in this protocol. But the skin, the body of the work, is still there," writes the journalist from L'Oeil magazine. "Just as the artist's body remains present, the physical act, his energy, which passes through the work and produces a discharge on the spectator. Whether buildings or flowers, everything here speaks of the passage of time...

Illustration: Philippe Cognée (1957) - Between Dog and Wolf, 2023
Courtesy TEMPLON, Paris - Brussels - New York / Philippe Cognée © Adagp, Paris, 2023