Forests, fields and sea views convey the power of his practice, his unconditional love for the medium of painting and his caustic view of our disenchanted era.

Philippe Cognée has spent the last twenty or so years tackling subjects associated with the banality of our civilisation, such as supermarkets, motorways and other impersonal architectures, and beautifying them with his unique painting technique, using wax that is heated and crushed to produce a blurred effect. His canvases are often produced in series, drawing on our technological culture – from photography to video and digital – to question the relevance of figurative painting today. They propose a deconstruction of the contemporary gaze as part of an existential questioning of the thinning away of the image.

With ‘Paysages Fragmentés’, Philippe Cognée has designed a journey in which visitors stroll through four atmospheres. At the entrance, abstract plum trees in blossom rub shoulders with an autumn undergrowth. The central space, under the glass roof, is devoted to snowy landscapes to the point of saturation. The room at the back reveals a series of forests shaped by the changing light of the seasons. In the basement, seascapes unfold in an unexpected panorama, reminiscent of maritime scenes by Matthieu van Plattenberg or Vincent Van Gogh. As always with Philippe Cognée, a virtuoso of his encaustic technique, the subject seems engulfed in wax, almost unrecognisable, blurred to the point of abstraction. The scenes are as fascinating as they are disturbing. The dripping or scraped, diluted, liquefied surface confronts the viewer with a dilemma: to contemplate a majestic nature in perdition or to act. Each landscape reveals an irreconcilable misunderstanding between nature and humanity: a celebration of the beauty of the world haunted by the climate anxiety of our societies.