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Francoise Petrovitch at Galerie RX.
Art in America, May, 2008 by Paul B. Franklin
Few contemporary artists embrace drawing with as much fervor as Francoise Petrovitch. Rather than a means to an end, the process of laying marks down on paper (or directly on walls) is the mainstay of this 40-something French artist's esthetic project. "Ne Bouge Pas Poupee" (Don't Move Doll), her recent solo exhibition, illustrated her talent as a draftswoman as well as her ongoing interest in dolls as a potent metaphor for human experience.
The show featured three recent series of work. The front gallery comprised a group of seven large-scale ink-wash drawings (all 2007) titled Feminin-Masculin. In gray ink, Petrovitch depicts both ephebic boys and decidedly androgynous girls, alone or coupled. Each teen clutches a brightly colored toy or item of sports paraphernalia (boxing gloves, ball, etc.). The gender bending as well as the glazed looks on these children's faces highlight the struggle that both sexes face in the often-torturous transition to adulthood. Three small sculptures of female dolls (all 2007) were mounted on the wall of the middle gallery. From the series "Ne Bouge Pas Poupee," they are fashioned of blown glass with silvering applied to parts of the torso and arm areas. The vibrant play between transparency and reflection implicates the viewer in negotiating the ever-troubled boundary between self and other. These delicate but highly realistic creations (complete with articulated joints) echo contradictory sources ranging from Jeff Koons's stainless-steel toy elephants, puppies and rabbits to Hans Bellmer's far more disconcerting photographs of contorted and dismembered female dolls. The back gallery included 21 colored drawings of dolls (2005-08). With dense, multi-hued layers of ink, Petrovitch offered subtle portraits of these human standins, many of whom appear to possess severed heads or limbs.
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Petrovitch does not mine her own biography and tell stories of personal trauma like, say, Louise Bourgeois. Instead, she invokes the realities of childhood--and particularly girlhood--as embodied in the figure of the doll in order to suggest the profound psychic impression that this stage of human development makes on collective memory.
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