Galerie Templon is kicking off the new season in Brussels with the return of Philippe Cognée. In Eye of the Storm, the French painter, famous for his inimitable blurred wax technique, unveils a series of fifteen canvases flirting with abstraction. Created over the last year during the pandemic and keeping pace with the successive waves of lockdown, these new series alternate indoor and outdoor scenes. Views of a deserted but strangely serene studio contrast with a number of large impetuous landscapes, drenched in a nature bubbling over with life.
Philippe Cognée has long used his painting to explore the shifting contemporary perception of the most ordinary features of our environment, from motorways and supermarkets to anonymous hotel rooms and dreary suburbs. Drawing inspiration from photographs, videos or images garnered online, he questions our relationship to the image and the capacity for painting to transcend our vision of an increasingly uniform world. The wax-based painting he has been practising for over 20 years opens the door to a wide variety of experiments. Crushed, projected, melted and scraped, the surface he works on, similar to skin, reveals unexpected aspects of his sometimes unrecognisable subjects.
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