Natacha Donzé is a Swiss artist known for her deeply enigmatic canvases, drawing the viewer into her intensively colorful world. Grounding the canvas with an airbrush, she then adds delicate, often abstract details – aesthetic forms playing into our collective memory, provoking a sense of déjà-vu that is often hard to pin down.
How did you get into painting?
It always interested me, but I actually started my studies in the field of design. Later, I realized that I prefer to think about representation and image in a freer way - which brought me to ECAL/Ecole cantonale d‘art de Lausanne in Switzerland. I was drawing, experimenting with installation, text and sculpture, with all different types of media. After art school, painting just happened organically and I felt that this was the right tool for me. Painting is a simple medium, you don’t need much. I like the process that the canvas allows: you can start over on the same image and construct a representation through a medium that can be transformed while working at it.
What is your working process like?
The painting always starts with some concepts: not a drawing or a sketch, but rather a list of words. Usually it’s a short list of ideas, or it might start with a specific image, or a thing that I’m obsessed with at the time. I collect a lot of images from the internet, whether they’re press screenshots, scientific visuals, architectural renderings, technical illustrations and so on. Then I draw from this image bank, where the sources sometimes become obscure even to me. Somehow If I already knew what the painting would look like from the beginning, I would lose the desire to paint it. The act of painting is a way to discover something unexpected, a space where intuition takes over, it feels closer to the way my brain would dream.
So when you stand in front of the empty canvas you have no special image in mind?
Exactly. It's more like questions that I try to answer during the working process. I want to obtain an emotional connection with the painting and even if the representation is not clear, some elements like the colors, the sensations already exist for me. I just need to reach that melting point on the canvas, when all the concepts that I want to assemble come together. It’s a bit like creating an open world, wandering in a landscape.
And what about the format of your canvas?
I do think a lot about the format; I like to experiment with size. I consider the dimensions of the canvas as part of the concept – sometimes they add a sculptural or architectural quality to the work or the space they are shown in. Recently I have been working on larger scales that involve more physical interaction with the paintings. Large formats also allow me to work on different aspects of perception; what the viewer would perceive from a distance and then work on details that involve a closer interaction with the body. Sometimes some paintings feel more appropriate on a smaller canvas, maybe because they are closer to objects, or demand a different bodily intimacy rather than something atmospheric. Usually each topic finds its own format.
Once you have decided on the format, you start by grounding the canvas in color…
I mostly work with an airbrush, spraying the paint. I really like this tool, because it physically disconnects you from the object and introduces a mechanical aspect to the working process. When I build the layers of a painting, I use the airbrush to produce some effects, sparks of fire, water drops, cells and so on… these are details recognizable to the spectator, in this way, it allows a play with the audience, between what they consciously recognize and what functions more like a retinal afterimage or a background presence.
Why this interest in effects? Does it come from our obsession with technology?
The idea of an effect can be related to what is real versus what is artificial, and this connects to the way we envision technologies, digital images, or devices. This question of what is part of our reality versus what is constructed seems to be at the core of how we interpret the boundaries between the natural and the synthetic. It makes us reconsider authenticity and perception. When the eye sees a painted effect, the brain goes through a process of identification, and sometimes I want to paint things that you might recognize instantly, maybe because I feel that stereotypical representations persist in memory. It’s about utilizing a common language that reaches a large audience and playing with the space between what your brain synthesizes immediately and what memory can invoke.
I really strive to evoke things that are familiar to the viewer. They might get this impression of a blurred memory, of a déjà-vu feeling, but can’t precisely pinpoint it. To achieve this language, I add layers and blend symbols and patterns. These representations are always situated between different worlds. In some specific series, I think of these shapes as organisms; sometimes they are more like symbols, and other times they resemble recognizable figures or animals.
So is provoking an uncanny feeling what you are after?
I try to use the idea of an enigma or a fragment: it’s an image that is constructed in such a way that you will try to complete it. I'm interested in synthetizing things, and allowing for elements to become strangely connected together. I’m interested in the idea of uncanny because when something feels familiar but strange at the same time, it tends to stick with you for a while. Sometimes it’s the juxtaposition of ideas that haunts me, the way they interact or clash. That friction can create something bizarre, and painting becomes a way to make it tangible.
In a review on an exhibition of yours last summer, your work was described as showing a “burning world”. Do you agree?
It was the right description for some paintings in that show, but an apocalyptic perception is not always at the core of my work. Fire is a very primal thing, there are a lot of things it can convey – the apocalypse, but also the beginning of everything. I find the idea of chaos very compelling, because it can nurture new forms. It does not necessarily have to do with concepts of darkness.
What other topics do you care about?
I am interested in the economy, politics and the forces that are shaping our reality. Technology is a subject that is recurrent, even if it’s not obvious all the time, it’s always connected to the way I paint and look at the world. Different technologies are tied to time and they speak a lot about specific moments through history. I realize now that in some earlier work, I was exploring an old idea dating from the 1980s, in the sense that technology will bring the world to the brink. Now, I am rather thinking about the fact that technology is getting closer to biology by mimicking organisms or functioning in a close relation to the body or nature.
What else inspires you?
Music and movies, but also images more generally, the way they circulate, the systems they are part of and the type of images themself. They can be from the press, advertising, everyday environments or generated by machines such as medical renderings for instance; all of this new technology that appeared and creates images that the human eye cannot access.
What inspirations are you following right now?
When I started working on my next show, the first thing that came to mind was the picture of the Valdaro Lovers. (Note: It is a pair of human skeletons, about 6,000 years old, discovered in a neolithic tomb in Italy. They were buried face to face with their arms around each other, which reminds of a loving embrace, hence the name.) I was obsessed with starting the show with these bodily remains of lovers buried together. The image connects you to intimacy and death but somehow when I painted it I was looking for something closer to a beginning, an image re-composing itself rather than speaking of decomposition. The title of the painting that came after the lovers “Not built, but born” also speaks of the idea of auto generated things, their relation to humans, emotions and “reality”. Somehow death needs no proof, it consumes it all.
Which begs the question: How do you know when a painting is finished?
It’s pretty clear to me. The paintings take a lot of time; even if the act of painting itself might be quick, the canvas will then stay in my studio for weeks or months or longer. I sometimes wait a long time between adding different layers; it might take three months before I put on the next. I really take time to think before I achieve even a very simple gesture. But I definitely know when I have reached the last layer, there’s a momentum where things are aligned and the urge of painting disappears.
I find aestheticism in your work – it does give off a sense of beauty. Is that important to you?
The idea of a seductive or visually attractive image is always tied to a form of manipulation, and I’m interested in how that can operate within a painting. I like to think about what is attractive but also repulsive – and how it connects to having a very physical bodily effect.
What is your objective for the next couple of years?
What definitely interests me is to construct a body of work that can exist together. The way I see it is that I like to work on projects, a series of paintings or on a corpus of paintings that function together, I like to focus on some specific topics at a time, and when I feel that the paintings are working together, I am allowed to go to another narrative. In the future I would like to integrate more installations with paintings.
What are your next projects?
My next show is in September 2025 with max goelitz gallery in Berlin. The exhibition valeurs refuge forms a cycle: love and death, capital and desire, bodies and buildings, all held in a fragile, glowing equilibrium.
Text: Alexandra Markl
Photos: Valeriia Ivanova
