valeurs refuge | natacha donzé

In Not built, but born (2025) two skulls face each other in stillness, lovers and remains, beginnings and endings at once. Their iconic presence evoking a portal that opens onto another dimension of time. Love and death are condensed into a single emblem. The atmosphere shimmers in golds, acid yellows, and sunset tones: colors suggesting both fertility and corrosion, faith and technology. The layered surface resembles a membrane, marked by chemical burns, like the digital skin of a machine. This work does not speak of construction but of emergence – a body of feeling that cannot be built, only born. Natacha Donzé draws on historical references and illustrations of skeletons in which couples embrace each other closely. In these images, intimacy and death seem inextricably linked, while at the same time raising the question of what endures.

With the series Spinalscraper (2025), Donzé presents panoramic sequences of canvases in which a serpentine skeleton stretches across multiple paintings, devouring itself endlessly. Fossil and market curve, digestive system and diagram, all at once and never completely. The image holds the rhythm of a metabolism, to consume, to dissolve, to begin again. Spinalscraper embodies the principle of survival as cycle, caught between renewal and collapse. The snake transforms into a body without flesh, a structure without end, and thus becomes a reflection of infinity.

In Attrition surface, love and labor (2025), Attrition surface, afterimage of growth (2025) and Attrition surface, valeurs refuge (2025), architectural facades appear less as buildings than as vulnerable bodies. In this series, Donzé explores corporate architectures, bodily gestures, and social structures, tracing connections between bodies, labor and capital. Surfaces glow with gold, darken with burns, and seem to crack under invisible heat: they recall corporate towers at sunset, sacred walls marked by time, ruins that promise both shelter and collapse. Their chromatic glow hovers between sacred aura and financial speculation, shimmering with golden reflections that evoke both microchips and office towers at dusk. 

The surface of round canvas Spinning eye, monument with its layered shades of blue color developes a strong pull and at the same time a cool cosmic atmosphere. From the centre outward spiral circles move to the edge of the piece and seem to gather there like bubbles, unable to escape. Donzé uses the spiral as a symbol of belief systems and unfathomable phenomena. The layering of various hues of blue gives the impression of expanse and depth, creating a boundless space in the centre. This deep color reminds one of cinematographical pictures or color codes of corporate identities while simultaneously representing a hypnotic vortex, circling through time and space, allowing access to different dimensions. The artist paints highly detailed and bright particles onto the canvas that seem to sit on the surface like microorganisms that have escaped the image. This iconographic complexity is typical for Donzé's work. With it's help she questions political, commercial and institutional systems, also today’s customary views while embedding fragments thereof in her imagery.

In the large-format painting Gathering into Order (2020), a grid of dark lines runs across an orange background, dividing the four canvases into individual sections. In the upper part of the picture, as well as in the lower corners, dark spots spread synchronously, giving the impression of indented screens and flowing chemicals making their way through their technical shell in search of an exit. At the same time, the view opens up, as if through a window into a foggy and hot atmosphere filled with smoke. Small fluorescent particles shimmer in front of the apparent window pane, glowing from the pictorial space. Due to the size and structure of Gathering into Order, the painting appears like an architectural element that breaks through the surface of the painting and forms a space in which a post-apocalyptic spectacle takes place.

Natacha Donzé's large-scale canvases from the series Ghost Gun abstractly reference corporeality and its potential vulnerability. Ghost Gun depicts clusters resembling enlarged microorganisms such as cells or viruses, overlaid with a transparent film. This layer, with its precise and geometric cutouts, starkly contrasts with the organic structures. The clusters resemble technical blueprints for firearms, made publicly available as open-source files, and their kits can be reconstructed as "Ghost Guns" – untraceable weapons without identifiable serial numbers. Fascinated by the dissemination and generation of knowledge, Donzé observes the emergence of potentially dangerous objects that proliferate online. She sees these phenomena like organic systems constantly in motion, evolving and bringing them together in Ghost Gun. 

Installation view Body Care, Schleifmühlgasse 1, Vienna, 2022 | Photo: Kunstdokumentation.com