Robert Cottingham — Galerie G.P. & N. Vallois
Gleaming, vibrant, and almost enticing, the machines painted by Robert Cottingham on view at the G.P. & N. Vallois gallery reverse the prism of desire by turning tools into fully embraced objects of fascination.
Through the sheer magic of painting, these technical instruments—cameras, typewriters, industrial components—acquire an enigmatic sensuality, where reflections and volumes express a fundamental transformation of the human imagination that began at the turn of the 20th century.
Cottingham, a master of American realism, does not merely imitate reality: he elevates it, isolates it, decontextualizes it to reveal its symbolic charge. In the exhibition Cameras, Typewriters & Components, which brings together works mainly produced between the late 1990s and early 2000s, the artist explores a technological memory already tinged with nostalgia. By focusing on emblematic objects from the 1950s, he revisits icons from his own youth—Cottingham was born in 1935—as well as the foundations of a modern culture in which typography, image, and language were tools for structuring reality.
In this meticulous act of reproduction lies a symbolic will to possess. Far from a simple fetishism of the object, it is an attempt to pin down a desire: the desire to appropriate what once was, to capture the object not with the hand, but with the gaze. One is reminded here of Walter Benjamin, who wrote of the artwork’s “aura” lost through mechanical reproduction; Cottingham, in a reversal of this idea, restores a new aura to these objects, precisely by transposing them into the pictorial realm.
The exhibition’s scenography heightens this tension: explosive, almost confrontational, it creates a striking face-to-face encounter between the viewer and these now obsolete devices, which once carried the most powerful narratives of the twentieth century—photography and printed text. This ironic staging, tinged with gentle melancholy, questions our relationship with technology. If photography always captures a moment—a “that-has-been”—Cottingham extends its being by shifting the reflection toward all that it could have been, and can still become under the transfiguring gaze of painting.
Thus, painting regains a paradoxical centrality: an ancient medium for modern objects that have themselves become relics, it becomes both archive and projection. In the materiality of its layers, in the slowness of its execution, painting condenses an affective memory that time, far from erasing, sharpens and deepens. And perhaps this is where the essential lies: in the vertigo we feel before what appears to be the most faithful reproduction of reality—an unquenchable need to transcend the image in order to reach that which, within it, exceeds us: the very desire to represent.
Robert Cottingham, Cameras, Typewriters & Components, G.P. & N. Vallois Gallery, From 06.12.25 to 07.19.25 , 36, rue de Seine, 75006 Paris Learn more
