Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, I’m going to tell you about a painter who melts reality like no one else. Philippe Cognee is not just a talented artist, he is a surgeon of the image, a pictorial pyromaniac who operates at the precise junction where our contemporary world dissolves into its own banality. It is no coincidence that this man, armed with an iron as others wield brushes, has become one of the most relevant French artists of his generation.
His technique, absolutely unique, resembles a form of visual sabotage. He photographs the world, projects these images onto a canvas, meticulously paints them with a mixture of beeswax and pigments, and then, here is the critical moment, covers the whole thing with a plastic film that he attacks with an iron. The heat liquefies the wax, deforms the image, and the reality so carefully reproduced begins to melt, to slide, to transform into a phantom of itself. It’s as if Cognee had invented a device to show memory erasing itself live.
This technique is not just a signature, it is a philosophical position. In an era where images bombard us to the point of asphyxiation, Cognee offers us images that breathe, bleed, and sweat. Think of those freezers he painted in the 1990s, those white monuments of domestic life transformed into ghostly tombs. Or those supermarkets, those modern cathedrals where we commune around capitalism, made strange and almost abstract by his vision. Cognee dissolves the everyday to reveal its brutal poetry, its unsettling fragility.
This leads me to his next exhibition, “Fragmented Landscapes”, at the Galerie Templon from March 8 to May 10, 2025, in Paris. After decades spent dissecting our urban environment, Cognee turns his gaze towards forests, fields, and the sea. But don’t imagine tranquil landscape paintings, these new works are arenas where nature and technique, permanence and dissolution clash.
Cognee’s art brilliantly dialogues with the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard, for whom matter is not merely an object but an active partner of creative imagination. In The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Bachelard writes that “man is a creator of fire” [1]. This observation seems tailor-made for Cognee, whose creative process literally uses heat to transform matter. This is not just a technique, it is a living metaphor of our relationship with the world. As Bachelard notes, fire is both “intimate and universal” [2], just like Cognee’s subjects oscillate between the deeply personal and the collective archetype.
This dialectic of matter is at the heart of Cognee’s work. When he paints a forest, it is not a simple representation of nature, but an exploration of the way nature itself is already an image in our representation-saturated culture. His forest is doubly mediated: first by the camera or video he uses to capture the original image, then by his wax deformation process. The nature that emerges is strange, unsettling, as if seen through the steamed-up window of an overheating civilization.
This process of defamiliarization recalls what philosopher Martin Heidegger called “unconcealment”, the idea that art does not simply represent the world but unveils it anew. In his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Heidegger argues that “art is not the reproduction of the visible, but renders visible” [3]. Cognee’s works perfectly embody this function: they do not reproduce our world, they render it visible differently, by highlighting precisely what we no longer see because we see it too much.
Take his series of “Carcasses” (2003), those suspended pieces of meat, both repulsive and fascinating. Cognee transforms them into organic monuments, bloody abstractions that remind us of our own status as beings of flesh. The series forms a kind of arena where the viewer finds themselves surrounded by these contemporary memento mori. There is a direct confrontation with our mortality, but also with the brutal realities that our asepticized civilization tries to hide.
This is where Heidegger’s thought resonates with Cognee’s work: in this refusal to accept the world as it is presented to us daily. By blurring reality, by melting it, Cognee invites us to truly see it, perhaps for the first time. As Heidegger writes, “the original truth is nothing other than the unconcealment of things, the appearance of being” [4], a phrase that could serve as a manifesto for Cognee’s entire work.
This quest to reveal what lies beneath the surface of things is particularly evident in his series “Landscapes seen from the train” (2013). Here, Cognee captures the world at high speed, from the windows of a TGV. The result is not just a blurred representation of a fast landscape, but a meditation on perception itself in a world always on the move. “More than the image of a landscape, it is that of the passage of time of its vision that I restore in my painting”, he says [5]. This remark is profoundly Heideggerian in its understanding of art as the revelation of a temporal truth, not as the simple reproduction of a static reality.
But it would be a mistake to see Cognee solely through the prism of German philosophy. His work is also deeply rooted in the history of painting, particularly in the tradition of vanitas. His wilted flowers, those peonies and amaryllises captured at the precise moment their beauty begins to decompose, fit into this long line of memento mori. But unlike classical vanitas, which used codified symbols to evoke death, Cognee works directly with the perishable materiality of the world.
His monumental flowers, exhibited in 2020 in “Carne dei fiori” (Flesh of Flowers), are not merely representations of decomposition, but incarnations of it in the pictorial material itself. The wax that flows, deforms, and tears away in places becomes a perfect metaphor for organic life in its fragility. As he explains himself: “These wilted flowers, at the end of their life, refer us to our own fragile and ephemeral existences” [6].
This acute awareness of fragility is also found in his approach to architecture. Cognee’s buildings, those structures supposed to be solid and permanent, dissolve before our eyes, as if the very fixity of the constructed world were an illusion. His “Google Earth” series pushes this logic even further, transforming satellite views of cities into abstract graphic configurations, similar to encrypted writings. There is an archaeology of the present, a way of looking at our civilization as if it were already in ruins.
It is this archaeological quality that truly connects Cognee to the thought of Gaston Bachelard. In Earth and Reveries of Rest, Bachelard explores our intimate relationship with terrestrial matter, our way of projecting our dreams and anxieties onto it. He writes that “matter is our energetic mirror; it is a mirror that focuses our powers by illuminating them with imaginary joys” [7]. This sentence could perfectly describe Cognee’s relationship with wax, this material that he uses not simply as a medium, but as an active partner in the creative process.
Wax, this substance that can transition from solid to liquid and vice versa, becomes for him a way to explore the very plasticity of reality. As he says: “Wax is a magical material… It seems to imprison color between the background and the surface. […] What I like is that it is a fragile and delicate material that carries within it this possibility of transforming itself continuously through heat and thus making the subject disappear” [8]. Here we find exactly this Bachelardian dialectic between permanence and transformation, between rest and action.
The fact that Cognee chooses wax, a material associated with Roman Egypt’s funerary portraits, is not insignificant. There is in this choice a deep historical consciousness, a way of linking his contemporary work to a millennial tradition of representing the human confronted with its finitude. But there is also a profoundly subversive gesture: where the Fayum portraits sought to preserve the image of the deceased for eternity, Cognee uses the same technique to show the inevitable dissolution of all things.
This tension between preservation and dissolution is at the heart of his artistic project. Faced with a world where everything becomes an image, where reality itself seems to dissolve into its media representation, Cognee offers a painting that accepts and integrates this dissolution, but makes it an act of resistance. By showing the fragility of the world, he paradoxically affirms the permanence of our need to represent it, to understand it through art.
His work is particularly relevant in our era of climate anxiety. In his new landscapes exhibited at the Templon gallery, Cognee uses his encaustic technique to create “an impression of subjects engulfed in wax, almost unrecognizable, blurred to the point of abstraction” [9]. These natural scenes, both fascinating and disturbing, confront us with a dilemma: to contemplate nature in all its threatened majesty, or to act. Each landscape testifies to an irreconcilable misunderstanding between nature and humanity, celebrating the beauty of a world haunted by climate anxiety that consumes our societies.
What is remarkable about Cognee is that he maintains this level of critical tension while creating works of striking beauty. There is an almost carnal sensuality in his way of working with matter, an evident enjoyment of color and texture that perfectly balances the gravity of his subjects. This productive tension recalls what Heidegger called the “strife” (Streit) between world and earth in the work of art, that constant struggle between meaning and matter, between what reveals itself and what withdraws.
In the words of the artist: “There has always been in me this will to construct and destroy at the same time in order to find a third state in this in-between” [10]. It is precisely in this in-between that the power of his work resides, neither entirely abstract nor entirely figurative; neither entirely in the celebration of the world nor completely in its critique; but in this intermediary zone where art truly becomes necessary to think about our condition.
So yes, go see “Fragmented Landscapes” at the Galerie Templon. You will see an artist at the height of his art, a painter who has found a unique way to account for our world in dissolution without ever giving in to despair. In an artistic landscape often divided between postmodern cynicism and reactionary naivety, Cognee traces a third way, that of a critical engagement that never abandons beauty.
And if you don’t go, well, you will have missed the opportunity to see one of the greatest contemporary French painters show us not how the world is, but how it undoes and remakes itself before our eyes, in the transformative heat of his vision.
- Bachelard, Gaston. The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Gallimard, 1938.
- Ibid.
- Heidegger, Martin. Paths that Lead Nowhere. Gallimard, 1962.
- Ibid.
- Cognee, Philippe. Cited by Guillaume Lasserre. “Philippe Cognee, transgressing the real”. Mediapart, November 4, 2023.
- Cognee, Philippe. Interview with Isabelle Capalbo. “Philippe Cognee: Carne dei fiori, the tragic and sensual beauty of flowers”. Artistikrezo, June 5, 2020.
- Bachelard, Gaston. Earth and Reveries of Rest. Jose Corti, 1948.
- Cognee, Philippe. Interview with Isabelle Capalbo. “Philippe Cognee: Carne dei fiori, the tragic and sensual beauty of flowers”. Artistikrezo, June 5, 2020.
- Press kit, exhibition “Philippe Cognee – Fragmented Landscapes”, Galerie Templon Paris, 2025.
- Cognee, Philippe. Interview with Philippe Piguet. Art Interview, June 2021.
