EXHIBITION : Philippe Cognée : "La Peinture d'après"

#EXHIBITION On the occasion of its reopening, the Musée Bourdelle is devoting its most important retrospective in Paris to the French painter and sculptor Philippe Cognée. 
Held in the wing designed by Christian de Portzamparc, the exhibition "Philippe Cognée. La peinture d'après" is articulated around the Basel Catalogue, a dizzying array of a thousand pieces by the artist, produced between 2013 and 2015.

The multiple works in the Basel Catalogue are elaborated according to the same protocol. The artist, after tearing out pages from the Art Basel catalogs, paints a copy of and on top of the reproduction of a work. Emblematic or less famous, even forgotten artists, everyone is included. Mounted on aluminum, these works are presented next to each other in the heart of a long labyrinth, forming a hypnotic frieze. Like photograms, they draw a sequence or a travelling shot. The painting thus appears as a red thread, or an Ariadne's thread...

This crucial project is preceded by a long introductory sequence, which attests to the pre-existence and anchoring of major notions in the artist's work: "repainting" and formal proliferation. Thus, paintings and sculptures remind us of the extent to which Philippe Cognée has been exploring, since the 1980s, the overlaying of paint, optical saturation and the heritage of his elders - Velázquez, Ingres or Rubens. 

Finally, a large room, as if trapped in the labyrinth, constitutes the third sequence of this exhibition: while his Tête de taureau (1989) - an archaizing sculpture evoking the minotaur - faces Bourdelle's Grand Masque tragique (1901), the walls host six monumental and unpublished canvases representing vegetal works that enter into a dialogue with Antoine Bourdelle's sculpture. The artist's premise is as follows: are not both crossed by the same vitalist sap, by the same principle of germination?