‘I work “with” ink’s adventures, not “against” them,’ says Françoise Pétrovitch, speaking of the drawings that first brought her recognition – including depictions of bewildered children, mercurial teenagers, birds caught mid-flight, yellow or blue dogs, couples, and smokers. In her wash drawings, engravings, and oil paintings, she lets tears and rivers of pigment flow, lingering on the gestures that define us: carrying, hiding, blinding, clutching, caressing, releasing, devouring. Her studios in Cachan, in the Paris suburbs, and Normandy (where she increasingly takes refuge), harbor a multitude of beings that retreat and press forth, faces that mask and unmask themselves. ‘They can be witnesses, sentinels, victims, or shift from one state to another: life is long, and I’m interested in impermanent states – this transformation of beings, and particularly the adolescent figure.’

Are they dominated or dominant, absent or present? ‘These questions of perspective haunt me, as does the theme of the dominant gaze. My characters appear like epiphanies. Are they real or not? They emerge from photographs I take, or from observation, and then things veer off course.’ When looking at her work, it is true, that Pétrovitch’s figures appear solitary, sliding out of context, beyond reality. ‘I struggle with the realistic, anecdote-laden painting we see so much of today. That’s not what I’m after. There’s a great deal of silence in my work, and while we all feel besieged by the noise around us, we ultimately find ourselves, despite everything, in profound silence.’ In her work, everything is played out in the wings: in spaces where the white paper speaks to the impossibility of truly capturing another. ‘The white of the paper is the skeleton, at once the most superficial and the most profound.’

At 60, Pétrovitch maintains, both in herself and in her work, an unnerving blend of liveliness and melancholy. Since her first retrospective at the Fonds Hélène & Édouard Leclerc in Landernau, in northwestern France, she has racked up a string of successful projects, first at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, then at the Musée de la vie romantique, both in Paris. This winter, she has been given carte blanche at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, where with variations on a flower, she engages in dialogue with the painter Berthe Morisot. And at the Musée Jenisch Vevey in Switzerland an exhibition celebrates her prints alongside works by Félix Vallotton and Ferdinand Hodler held in the collection. This summer, she will take over MO.CO. in Montpellier.

But things weren’t so easy in the beginning. ‘For more than 15 years, I wasn’t noticed at all,’ she recalls. Driven by her admiration for Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt, she trained in engraving, earning a diploma in graphic arts in Lyon. ‘There were three of us misfits in the workshop – nobody paid us any attention, we were almost an embarrassment. Compared to the fashionable painters, we were nothing; and to crown it all – a woman, with a background in applied arts, from the Savoyard region! It’s no coincidence that I started working in school notebooks, as if putting myself in my place. But there was this necessity to create within me, despite my shyness.’

She worked then with a needle on copper plates, ‘the antithesis of my wash drawings. Engraving is mental, mental, mental. Everything must be thought through, analyzed. One line is enough, it’s done, no flourishes needed.’ But from early on, she only had one fear: ‘becoming stuck in one lane, with one technique. I like confronting the particularities of all mediums, I don’t want to become enslaved. If you stay in the same space, either you end up disgusting yourself, or you go off the rails. A ceramicist, for example, is dedicated to one material; I want to dedicate myself to the subject: transformations, adolescence, fragilities.’ Gradually, her horizons expanded; she discovered painting late, then sculpture, and with it, ‘a density I didn’t have before. The brush, drawing – that’s flexibility; it’s organic, fluid. In sculpture, there’s a hardness, an adversity in the making, that leads me somewhere else.’

These days, Pétrovitch collaborates on opera and dance, and tests the limits of video. ‘For MO.CO., I’m working on an immersive, multichannel video, as if drawing were exploding in space. Staging shows has had a big impact on my videos. Setting the image in motion, working with volume and time, interacting with the audience – all this is new to me. I think I still have a great deal to explore when it comes to the materiality and immateriality of the image.’