The exhibition to see: Françoise Pétrovitch, her shared solitudes and her imaginary islands

“Romanticism is not my thing,” confides Françoise Pétrovitch to a handful of journalists on this April morning. Paradoxical, when at the same time, she is exhibiting in a place dedicated to the genre, a stone’s throw from the Moulin-Rouge? “Romantic painters tell a story, which I don’t.”. Nevertheless, the artist, born in Savoie in 1964, working between his workshops in Cachan (Val-de-Marne) and Verneuil-sur-Avre (Eure), played the game.

This Parisian lair, formerly the home and studio of Ary Scheffer – a painter in vogue with Louis-Philippe in the 1830s – offers him a thematic immersion. In the studio, Françoise Pétrovitch shows herself on a large scale, while the house sees her discreet, with small formats, almost hidden in the middle of the works in the permanent collection, including the “dendrites” of George Sand which she appears as a cigarette in the beak. The dominant color is pink, the cliché color of romanticism, just to match the original theme. Except that Pétrovitch has been working on this pigment for several years and that it is here in the continuity of his artistic approach.

Her corpus is mainly focused on adolescence, where she shows figures without revealing their context. In this exhibition at the Museum of Romantic Life, for which she produced some forty compositions, Françoise Pétrovitch is no exception to the rule. On the picture rails of the house, young people of today follow one another, indecipherable. Often in duet, but suggesting two shared solitudes rather than a couple. The artist has titled this Parisian meeting To like. To break upin reference to her dytique of 1997, where she made two monotypes in the margin of a conjugation book, a silhouette with an emerging flower standing out on the page of the verb “to love”, a pair of legs and a heart occupying the one dedicated to the verb “to break”.

“The resumption of this title for this immersion in the Museum of Romantic Life explains both the ambiguity of our versatile and contradictory feelings, and the theme of ‘in-between’, emblematic of the artist”, points out Gaëlle Rio, curator of the exhibition with the scientific collaboration of Elodie Kuhn. The characters never look at the viewer, they have their eyes closed, lowered or turned towards a mysterious horizon. Distant or connected in a silent intimacy, the perceptible void between them questions otherness as much as impediment. “Adolescence interests me because it is the time of metamorphoses and possibilities. Far from always being in a blissful craze, we are rather aware of the difficulty of living”, explains Françoise Pétrovitch. Series Holdwhich literally sees one or the other supporting the other, is in this respect most telling.

“The imagination makes the landscape”, wrote Baudelaire during the 1859 Salon. the romantics on nature in the 19th century. These landscapes, which she composes practically in one stroke, without sketching under her eyes – “it’s almost something that we let happen” -, are “imaginary islands”.

Unreal human figures are introduced, accentuating the dreamlike rendering. If the curators of the Museum of Romantic Life see there “works weaving a natural link with the dreamed views of romantic painters”, we do not really know what Françoise Pétrovitch thinks. She is, in truth, as enigmatic as her paintings.