Natacha Donzé’s valeurs refuge doesn’t so much occupy max goelitz gallery in Berlin as it transfigures it—rendering its walls into an ambient topography of luminous surfaces, strange devotion, and slow-burning ambiguity.
This is not just a painting show. It’s a metabolic field where sacred symbology entangles with the clinical hues of post-capitalist aesthetics, forming a space that feels at once ecclesiastical and digitally post-human.
The exhibition’s emotional and conceptual axis is Not built, but born (2025), a quietly devastating canvas featuring two skulls locked in a static, intimate stare. They’re less memento mori than meta-lovers—cyphers for beginnings and endings, icons of circuitry and bone. Donzé bathes them in gold and acid yellow, a palette that suggests both reverence and radiation. In this encounter, connection is not engineered—it’s emergent, a flicker between past and future, fertility and rot.
From this central pulse, the Attrition surfaces series begins to unfold like glass towers under strain. These canvases oscillate between the facades of corporate high-rises and the scarred flesh of something exhausted but alive. They don’t depict structures so much as the emotional temperature of architecture—the sweat, stress, and seduction embedded in surfaces polished to the point of erasure. Fire, in Donzé’s hands, is both medium and metaphor: cleansing, scarring, necessary.
The serpentine rhythm accelerates in Spinalscraper (2025), a suite of paintings where spinal forms twist across the canvas like fossilized infrastructure. There’s something self-consuming here, a feedback loop of construction and erosion, evoking both market graphs and digestive tracts. It’s not just about survival—it’s about a body that learns to metabolize its own collapse, feeding on the ruins of its predecessors in order to persist.
In Metabolism (2025), Donzé’s visual language reaches an eerie calm. The snake motif—repeated, reconfigured—floats against synthetic gradients like ghost-code. Once feared as harbingers, they now feel closer to algorithms: smooth, silent, enduring. What once hissed now hums, tracing a continuity between organism and machine, body and schema, flesh and signal. They’re not predators but survivors—icons of adaptation.
Closing the cycle is the chillingly titled Death needs no proof, it consumes it all (2025), which serves less as a finale than as an afterimage. It lingers, ambiguous and glowing, like a memory you didn’t know you had. Here, Donzé strips away narrative and leaves only presence—a work that refuses evidence, yet remains undeniable.
Love and death, labor and decay, data and devotion—they don't oppose each other here. They co-exist, cyclically, in quiet combustion.
