Sète (Hérault). Barely two years after a splendor year, 2023, marked by three simultaneous exhibitions at the Orangery, the Bourdelle museum and the Tessé museum in Le Mans, we find Philippe Cogé (born in 1957) under other skies, in Sète. Even more than elsewhere, the quasi-retrospective presented at the Paul Valéry museum gives the impression of an artist in perpetual movement. Whether it is the technique or choice of themes, his work seems animated by constant impulse. An eclectic artist? Maybe. But above all, no doubt, a spirit guided by an insatiable curiosity. Should we seek the origin of this pictorial nomadism in a childhood spent in Africa, in Benin?
In any case, the organizers’ desire-Stéphane Tarroux, director of the Paul-Valéry Museum, and Olivier Weil, scientific commissioner-is to offer an overview of each of the themes explored by Coagé. Thus parade and portraits, vanities and flowers, carcasses and towers, and even, in its early days, labyrinths and mythological scenes – all treated sometimes with a draft or on canvas, sometimes with gouache mixed with acrylic. Some sculptures-assemblies complete the presentation.
The first room offers a kind of archaeological dive in the work with Minotaur (1982) or Labyrinth (1982), strange work, away from the rest of the pictorial production. Since the 1990s, however, it is the “real proximity” in all its necessary banality: The family on vacation, with Sandrine and Philippe on the beach at the Albufera (1995, [voir ill.]). According to the artist himself, the imagination no longer satisfies him: he now seeks to bring back in the pictorial field all that surrounds him. By parasitizing an imagery that reactivates the collective unconscious, it subtly played ironie and nostalgia, directly affects the most intimate and universal sensations.
A singular pictorial technique
However, Co -épée chooses neither realism nor, a fortiori, hyperrealism. If his subjects are often inspired by photographs he performs himself, the result is “filtered” by a complex process. The image is transposed using the frame, a pictorial technique based on colored pigments mixed with beeswax. Applied to a support that the artist covers a plastic film, this material is then heated and crushed with an iron. Liquefied, absorbed by matter, the forms expand and blur.
It is in architecture that transformation is revealed with the most evidence. The geometric structures lose their rigidity there, become uncertain, vacillating. These blurred images, united under the beautiful title of “proven structures”, make up an urban landscape partially engulfed in the fog. Helped has a prophetic power? One of these paintings represents the Center Pompidou, already seem boned, as seized in the middle of the renovation site (Beaubourg2014). Faced with this mineral world, deserted by human beings, nature is expressed by the presence of flowers. Disproportionate, occupying the foreground, they give off an almost disturbing sensuality. Carnivorous plants?
Elsewhere, these are carcasses paintings in a slaughterhouse or skulls that complement the organic dimension of the work. In short, despite the recent canvas presented at the end of the course – The moon rises on the calm sea (2025) -, the universe of Co -épée Rarely remains peaceful. His tormented self -portraits do not deny this impression in any way.
