Philippe Cognée is one of the most recognised artists of his generation, having been awarded the Villa Medici in Rome in 1990 and the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize in Paris in 2004. His practice unfolds in a figurative painting mixing realism and abstraction. 

The artist paints with wax, heated and then crushed, producing a blurred effect on the textured surface that questions the exhaustion of the image and the role of painting in a society where the image, under the effects of new technologies, is both omnipresent and impoverished. Wax, which carries within it the possibility of being transformed by heat, places the subject in a form of permanent fragility…