Philippe Cognée
L’œuvre du temps – Musée Paul Valéry
The Musée Paul Valéry in Sète is dedicating a solo show to Philippe Cognée, focusing on his approach to time.
From June 21 to November 2, 2025
For the first time, Philippe Cognée’s work is considered in its entirety through the prism of his relationship with time. Yet this essential theme deeply permeates the wide selection of works presented in the Musée Paul Valéry, spanning a period from the 1980s to the present day. This relationship with time is evident both in the recurrence of motifs in dialogue with art history and in the memorial dimension anchored at the heart of his technique. His encaustic painting, which distorts and alters images from photography and video, lends his work a palpable temporality, reflecting the subtle effects of time. Alongside the likes of Georg Baselitz and Gehrard Richter, Philippe Cognée is one of those artists who can visually translate our contemporary perception of time.
An artist’s work may be marked out by chronology, but it develops within a complex, heterogeneous temporality, where apparent ruptures frequently conceal metamorphoses. From this perspective, the question of time has emerged as a prism through which the multiple dimensions of an artist’s work can be seen.
This notion was the starting point for the joint reflections of the artist and the exhibition’s scientific curator, Olivier Weil, who saw it as a pertinent framework for apprehending the complexity of the work and revealing its internal dynamics. The Musée Paul Valéry has opted for an open yet coherent approach. Although three-dimensional pieces have been excluded, the exhibition encompasses the entirety of Philippe Cognée’s pictorial output, with occasional forays into the world of drawing or books, when the opportunity arose to enrich the overall theme.
“Philippe Cognée. L’œuvre du temps” offers a new vision of Philippe Cognée, despite the diversity of his series and media. Far from being limited to a simple stylistic evolution, it offers an immersion into a profound reflection on time, transformation and erasure. Between dissolution and emergence, Cognée’s painting becomes a place where memory, loss and persistence intertwine, offering us a unique experience of contemplation and reflection.
Autoportrait en vanité
Demander une preview
Contact
The artist
Philippe Cognée was born in 1957 in Nantes, France, where he lives and works. His paintings use wax that is heated and crushed, producing a blurred effect and raising questions such as the thinning away of the image and the human condition in the light of humans’ relationship to their urban environment. The artist draws inspiration from photos and videos of elements such as motorways, buildings and aerial shots. His work questions the role of art in a society where new digital technologies have ushered in the era of the image, both omnipresent and diminished.
