Bibliography
Julie Chaizemartin, Marc Donnadieu, Guy Tosatto, Philippe Cognée: Œuvres 2009-2022 / Works 2009-2022, Paris, Éditions Skira / Paris, Galerie Templon, 2022.
Bernard Fibicher, Atlas. Cartographie du don, exh. cat. Lausanne, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, 2019.
This painting of a wooded landscape is typical of French artist Philippe Cognée’s work. It reflects his deep appreciation for nature, his use of a restrained colour palette—blue for the sky, green for the vegetation, and yellow for the ground—and his mastery in creating visual tension through contrasts between sharp and blurred areas, vertical and horizontal lines, and zones of stillness and dense activity.
The subject began as a short video filmed by the artist with his mobile phone from a taxi in India. He then selected certain images on his computer to reinterpret on canvas, including this clump of trees, chosen for the contrasting dense cluster of foliage in the top two thirds, the dry, scattered splashes of colour representing plastic bags discarded at the foot of the trees, and the spindly trunks, captured in near-monochrome black and white.
Painted in the technique that has made Cognée’s reputation, the work began with a blend of oil, beeswax, and coloured pigments. The next step involves covering the work in plastic film, which is then ironed in a few carefully chosen spots. The wax melts in the heat, generating the sense of fluid movement in the original video, and underscoring the richly verdant foliage. The viewer can almost physically feel the dense leaves dancing in the breeze in the implacably bright sunlight.