Françoise Pétrovitch
Françoise Pétrovitch, Tome II, 2019
Semiose éditions
Text by Anne Bonnin
Françoise Pétrovitch is not a portraitist of individuality but of mood. Her works reflects a way of being, a fluctuating and uncertain presence/ absence that the artist never attelpts to elucidate. Succinct, nimble ans sensitive, her drawing like that of all great caricaturists, is capable of producing a being from a single line. All her paintings, both the lighter canvases and the more somber Nocturne, create a particular atmosphere : crystalline and aqueous in the former, more dense in the latter with figures emerging from a suffocating night, tarry like the blacks found in the 19th century paintings. The second volume deepens the nechantment engendered by her figures: sentimental, transparent and fluid crowds like the dreamy waters and fictions from witch they emerge.
Françoise Pétrovitch
Born in Chambéry in 1964, Françoise Pétrovitch lives in Cachan and teaches at the École Estienne in Paris. Very much attached to the book format and the immediacy of drawing, she also works in ceramics and more recently in painting and video. On paper or in the form of murals: kids, dolls and animals of uncertain identity merge by capillary action. Their secrets and concerns germinate through the use of colour and their melancholy is tenderly diluted in watercolour and ink. Femininity takes on a mythic aspect and the intimate is opened up to the world. With her publication Radio Pétrovitch, the artist responds through the medium of drawing to daily news flashes. In 2014, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chambéry exhibited forty of her works in an important solo show.
Her work features in the collections of the MNAM - Centre Georges Pompidou, the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris, the MAC/VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine, the Leepa-Rattner Museum in Tarpon Springs (USA) and various FRACs. In 2015, the LAAC of Dunkerque curated a solo show of her works within the collection of the museum and the one of the FRAC Nord-Pas-de-Calais. She represents France in the Organic Matter - Women to watch 2015 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts de Washington D.C. (USA).
In 2016, Françoise Pétrovitch's solo show was held at the Frac PACA, the Tarascon Castle and in Arles. In 2018, two solo shows will be dedicated to her work at Keramis and at the Centre de la gravure in La Louvière (BE).