LANDERNEAU.- Françoise Pétrovitch takes over the Halle des Capucins to show a world of images, both poetic and disturbing, peopled with human and animal figures. The exhibition, conceived with its curators, Camille Morineau and Lucia Pesapane, tells these narratives around themes recurrent in her work and through a rich selection of pieces. Some works, made especially for Landerneau, are presented for the first time. An invitation to the public of the FHEL to travel in that universe and, with the artist, to look behind the masks!

“To go off to explore Françoise Pétrovitch’s work is to meet a hyper creative artist fully engaged in her time. Lift the masks and look behind the beauty of her painting, at the fragility of the bodies and of the minds, the cracks, the difficulty to confront the world including one’s inner world.” ---Michel-Édouard Leclerc

Françoise Pétrovitch has invented an “augmented drawing” in which the visual support is no longer important, nor the topology of the subject or the scale of its representation: It is an attitude. “I can’t dissociate what I say from how I say it… The works come from me, from my intimate world. I trust the work process.”

From drawing in the margins of exercise books to choreography, from sculpture to the stage curtain and the trail around a town, it is the same risk taking that is at work in the art of Françoise Pétrovitch, whose scope the exhibition at FHEL unveils. “One of my motivations is to not be in the mastery, but to put myself ‘in danger’, in reflection, in a situation of experimenting. Some things find their expression in painting, others in drawing, and others still in film.”




The exhibition offers a chrono-thematic trail whose chapters are introduced by the artist’s own words. The great themes follow one another according to their appearance in her work, each one including a focus that balances the theme: sometimes clarifying it, sometimes contradicting it, or developing it in a different technique.

This “augmented drawing” of all the techniques is the operating principle of a work in which the line, matched with the colour in an absolute synthesis, also figures the seeing. Drawing as a way of life, as a way of looking, of interpreting the world, is the thread of the exhibition trail which, room after room, invites us to reflect on the focal point of that work: it is a real exercise in learning how to look. --Camille Morineau

“I fight the narrative, everything that would limit the figures I show. I propose blocks of images, I don’t want a story that closes on itself. If we say everything there’s nothing left to think.” --Françoise Pétrovitch

Françoise Pétrovitch was born in Chambéry, in Savoie, in 1964. She lives and works in Cachan, in Val-deMarne (94) and in Verneuil-sur-Avre, in Eure (27). She’s been teaching at the Ecole supérieure des arts et industries graphiques, the Estienne school, in Paris, for thirty years. Fascinated by drawing from the very beginning, the artist also works in painting, sculpture, printing, ceramics and video. Her universe questions, among others, the ambiguity of childhood and adolescence, genders, hybridity, while playing with mediums and formats. Her favourite subjects evolve, going from the very small to the vastly monumental. An autodidact in several fields, she likes to confront the use of new materials and learn different practices. Without ever leaving drawing aside, she goes from one technique to another with, for line, a red thread.

Françoise Pétrovitch is more and more present in the big public and private collections. She had many exhibitions in France but also abroad. Represented by Galerie Sémiose, she exhibits in Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, New York and Washington. Having been given various rewards, she was awarded in 2021 the Prize for drawing by the Fondation d’art contemporain Daniel and Florence Guerlain. After this encounter planned in Landerneau this year, an exhibition entitled Derrière les paupières (Behind the eyelids), is programmed for 2022, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF).