Philippe Cognée "Carcasses" Solo Exhibition

The "Sliced Beef" series, 70.5x45 cm, 2003. Philippe Cognée's "Carcasses" solo exhibition is on view at Daniel Templon Gallery from March 1 to April 5. Born in 1957, Philippe Cognée is one of France’s leading contemporary painters. Since his free-image works of the 1980s, many of his peers have faded from the art scene, while he stands alone with his distinctive hazy (ironed wax) paintings. In a new horizon of painting, Cognée consistently questions the current world artists face through series ranging from landscapes and supermarkets to everyday objects and factories.

This solo exhibition draws on bloody pig or beef themes from Rembrandt, Stin, and Bacon, inspired by slaughterhouses. It depicts sliced, bloody beef chunks, where hazy imagery materially manifests a unique pictorial atmosphere within bold forms, emotional colors, and architectural structures, developing concepts of viewing and memory. Critic Eric Suchère writes: “What is shocking in Philippe Cognée’s paintings is this extreme ability to retain everything from a distance. Regardless, it is a proximity that is nonetheless different. Under this ability, he transforms them into paintings, into pictorial objects—objects never seen this way before, because such displacement did not originally exist.”

“The problem of viewpoint, framing, the relationship between image size and painting technique… certainly also choice, choosing what to paint and how to paint it. This question is primary. Does technique lead the image? People talk about subject matter to avoid all ambiguity, or vice versa? What is found textually and determinately in the conditions of the image is inevitable, formed through it, and simultaneously a deformation of the (subject).” Finally, the artist states: “Painting is a form of thought that does not rely on words, yet in all material types.”