Visiotime 1: Cognée and Hurteau Challenge Painting's Obsolescence

Philippe Cognée and Philippe Hurteau launched Visiotime 1 in November 2002 at the Centre culturel – Galerie Jean Boucher in Rennes, Brittany, running until December 14, 2002. The exhibition featured their figurative paintings drawn from everyday life, both employing a 'Richterian' approach: Cognée uses blurring by physically manipulating the paint to reduce legibility, while Hurteau encrypts images from TV news and internet screens, creating fragmented spaces with missing sections. Their torn images aim to produce emptiness and illegibility, prompting viewers to mentally reconstruct a complete image rather than passively consume it. The initiative rejected traditional curatorial models, with artists controlling the exhibition's format and future iterations, including hosting other artists. A key component was an online debate about contemporary images and painting's relationship to them, involving researchers Stéphanie Katz and Paul Ardenne, which served as the exhibition's backbone rather than mere accompaniment. Visiotime challenged the notion of painting's obsolescence, arguing against both modernist fashion for new media and cynical nostalgia that reduces painters to survivors. The project sought to restore initiative to artists, introduce critical thinking into images, and refute the idea that painting lags behind media images in engaging with contemporaneity.