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.
"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 -