Finally a new exhibition of Philippe Cognée one of the few contemporary artists in the world to practice encaustic painting, one of the oldest and hardest. pictorial techniques. Finding an answer to a reality that is often uniform and gloomy sometimes imposes itself as a real quest for artists. To face the banality, Philippe Cognée has chosen a language of melted wax. Applied hot, crushed with an iron and then torn off by the plastic film, the wax offers in the painting a striking contrast, rich in texture and sensuality, with a dull reality. Highways, anonymous crowds, supermarkets and other daily lives have been the subject of her work. By choosing the theme of the flower, the painter makes a radical transformation. Where he had previously sought to sublimate a modern reality, his hearts of sunflowers, peonies or amaryllis are enlarged to the extreme and so distorted by the wax that they are barely recognizable. They seem almost dead, frozen, and yet the wax gives them such a materiality that they seem to be reborn in flesh. This time, Philippe Cognée's reality becomes almost magical, in an in-between between life and death, where we find the "memento mori" that haunts many of his series. A subtle response of poetry to modern decadence.