Two large and sixteen small windows—only by looking through each one is the full story revealed. Like any stage production, Françoise Pétrovitch’s window display is full of motion.

——Visualizing the spirit of the Faubourg

Everyone in Paris knows the Hermès flagship store at 24 rue du Faubourg Saint -Honoré. To mark the centennial of the store’s last major renovation, I looked to the 1920s for inspiration. It was a time when the Surrealist movement was sweeping the art scene. Thoughts of Surrealism immediately led me to ideas of coexistence, collage, and fragments. I decided to create a collage made up of various fragments related to the Faubourg store, all assembled into a harmonious whole, and then add movement to tell many overlapping stories.

——My starting point

In my case, sketching is what drives my work. I get inspiration from the notebook in which I jot down small moments from my daily life, sketching pictures of nature, people, animals, and more. Later, I go back to these sketches, changing their shape and size until they trigger something in my imagination that leads to a more complete work, such as the drawings in this window display. You can trace back all of my work to the lines in my sketchbook.

——In the window

From the beginning, I wanted to create a kind of paper theatre. I thought it would be good to incorporate the defining elements of my work—that is, my drawings. But I also wanted these drawings to move, albeit in a somewhat mechanical, simplistic way. The movements of all of the drawings would intersect, their interplay resulting in strange and surreal moments. I also tried to use Hermès products in a playful way—for example, I juxtaposed a drawing of a horse with a real saddle in the center of one window.

As the horse moved, I made sure that its hoof would be juxtaposed perfectly with the sandal that’s also on display. Then there is the drawing of a glove in the other window, which I made deliberately enormous.

In each of the smaller windows, you can see a drawing as well as an object barely visible behind it. They encourage the viewer to get a closer look and see how their shapes line up. It’s like peering through a keyhole. Each of the windows tells a story, but it is a story that the viewer can reshape into a narrative that is their own—a story no one else can tell.

*This window display concluded at the end of August 2024.