Bruxelles, 9 febbraio 2026 – Al pari della vita anche l’architettura risulta essere precaria. Infatti, essa sorge, si crepa, crolla e quindi ritorna alla terra dalla quale era emersa. Fin dall’inizio, ogni dipinto di Cognée è stato una natura morta. Una meditazione sulla fragilità del mondo. Alla Galerie Templon di Bruxelles, l’artista presenta tre serie di opere inedite che sviluppano questa riflessione sulla bellezza caduca delle cose.
LA BELLEZZA CADUCA DELLE COSE
Il primo gruppo di opere è composto da trentadue disegni a carboncino e acrilico su carta Arches. Dà vita ad architetture incerte, frutto di un processo di raccolta visiva ma svincolate da qualsiasi riferimento diretto. Ridotte alle loro strutture essenziali, esse divengono carcasse, griglie, strutture. Variazioni grafiche in cui la durezza del carboncino si scontra con la fluidità dell’acrilico: le superfici, graffiate e squarciate, generano paesaggi tragici intrisi di tensione drammatica, ponendosi in opposizione a ogni forma di lirismo impressionista.
Philippe Cognée, Traverser la ville 3, Picture © Atelier Philippe Cognée
Galerie Templon, Bruxelles: January 15 – February 28, 2026; After the retrospective exhibition at the Paul Valéry Museum in Sète (2025) and the widely acclaimed exhibitions at the Bourdelle Museum and the Orangerie Museum (2023), where he successively explored the domestic grace of flowers and the wildness of forests, painter Philippe Cognée returns, from January 15 to February 28, 2026, with his exhibition at Galerie Templon in Brussels, to a central theme of his work: architecture as a metaphor for the human condition. Architecture, like life, is precarious: it rises, cracks, collapses, and returns to the earth from which it emerged. From the outset, each of Cognée’s paintings has been a still life—a meditation on the fragility of the world. At Galerie Templon in Brussels, the artist presents three previously unseen bodies of work that unfold this reflection on the perishable beauty of things.
Philippe Cognée, Untilted 2024; picture © Laurent Edeline
The first group, composed of 32 charcoal and acrylic drawings on Arches paper, brings forth uncertain architectures, drawn from a process of visual collection yet detached from any direct reference. Reduced to their essential structures, they become carcasses, grids, frameworks—graphic variations in which the harshness of charcoal collides with the fluidity of acrylic. The surfaces, scratched and slashed, generate tragic landscapes imbued with dramatic tension, standing in opposition to any form of Impressionist lyricism.
Philippe Cognée, Sentinelles 1, Picture © Philippe Cognée
Philippe Cognée, Sentinelles 2, Picture © Atelier Philippe Cognée
In the series Traverser la ville (Crossing the City), executed in oil on wood, Cognée literally assaults the material. Using blunt tools, he brings forth hieroglyphic, almost abstract images, in which architecture is reduced to the state of silhouette, ghost, shroud. Finally, a group of encaustic paintings extends the artist’s fascination with vibrating blurs and shimmering pigments. At once luminous and melancholic, these works celebrate the fragile splendor of reality and elevate architecture to the status of a memento mori—a reminder of the passage of time and the impermanence of bodies.
Philippe Cognée, Untilted, 2024, Picture © Laurent Edeline
PHILIPPE COGNÉE
Born in 1957, Philippe Cognée lives and works between Nantes and Paris. A recipient of the Villa Médicis residency in 1990 and a finalist for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2004, he taught at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris for nearly a decade, mentoring a generation of young figurative painters. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, notably at the MAMCO in Geneva (2006), the Grenoble Museum (2013, 2022), the Château de Chambord (2014), the Fondation Fernet-Branca (2016), the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire (2020), the Chapelle de la Visitation in Thonon-les-Bains (2022), the Bourdelle, Orangerie, and Tessé museums (2023), and the Paul Valéry Museum in Sète (2025). His works are held in numerous prestigious public collections, including the Centre Pompidou, the Fondation Cartier, the Louis Vuitton Collection, the Museum Ludwig (Cologne), the Voorlinden Museum (Netherlands), the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne, and the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Paris). Philippe Cognée has been represented by Galerie Templon since 2002.
INFO
Éclats
Philippe Cognée
January 15 – February 28, 2026
Galerie Templon
13A rue Veydt
1060 Bruxelles
Tuesday – Saturday, 11h – 18h
