Joëlle Cabanne - visual artist
- Jan 26
- 3 min read
Joëlle Cabanne, the space of indigo
For Joëlle Cabanne, art is a breath, a natural extension of life and the world around her. For more than thirty years, she has advanced with gentleness and determination on an artist's path she forged alone, patiently, between the rigor of architecture and the freedom of pictorial gesture. Her first exhibition, at sixteen, in a Geneva tea room, was a revelation. She sold everything, not without a strange impression of loss, as if each canvas carried away a fragment of herself. It was already there, in this tension between attachment and detachment, that the essence of her creation played out: the necessity to give form to the intimate while offering it to the world.
Daughter of an architect and a secretary to an architectural firm's director, Joëlle grew up among plans and tracing paper. As a child, she colored her parents' translucent papers with Polychromos pencils, already tracing her first dialogues between light, matter, and space. This architectural sensitivity would never leave her. After an arts baccalaureate, she began studies in art history, modern Greek, and cinema history at the universities of Lausanne and Geneva, before entering EPFL in architecture. She then obtained her bachelor's at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD). During this period, the loss of her father marked a profound turning point: she withdrew toward painting and horses, two refuges, two forms of freedom. Later, she co-founded an architecture and urban planning firm in Carouge, thus combining her two vocations—to conceive and to create.
Her pictorial work, multiple and introspective, is traversed by gesture, breath, matter. Joëlle works simultaneously on drawing and painting. She loves the contact of paper, the spontaneity of line, and the depth that ink offers her, her technique of choice since 2010. Indigo has become the master hue of her universe. A deep blue, almost spiritual, which she calls her "indigo," color of night and light mingled.
In her canvases, often abstract but inhabited by interior landscapes, nature surfaces. The pictorial gesture becomes ritual: she paints on the floor, listening to an excerpt of a musical piece on loop, letting herself be guided by rhythm and intuition. She speaks of a "connection process," that suspended moment when thought fades to make way for emotion. The studio becomes a spiritual space, a passage between the visible and the invisible.
Painting is for her a meditative act, a form of breathing. She says she paints "from above," in an overarching vision, as if embracing the world in a single gaze. She sometimes uses old sheets that she places on the floor for protection, memory objects transformed into pictorial territories. Blue, omnipresent, becomes language. It speaks the depth of sky and ocean, but also melancholy, transparency, and life. It connects earth to cosmos, thought to matter.
Since 2018, Joëlle has deepened her research around paper, a fragile and essential medium. In her series Genius Loci, she explores the modeling of environments in crumpled, folded paper, dipped in indigo ink. Paper becomes volume, topography, miniature world. Once hardened, it takes form and invites projection: each person can read there a valley, a relief, an interior map. The artist plays with transparency, density, shadows. She then photographs these paper sculptures to reveal new perspectives, between reality and vision.
The choice of washo paper from the Awagami Factory in Japan, made for more than 1,500 years from natural fibers, fits into this approach of respect and continuity. Living, breathing matter, it extends her relationship with nature and sustainability. The process becomes a slow meditation: dipping, impregnating, drying, shaping. Water and ink work together, and from their encounter is born an intimate geography. Water coming thus from glaciers, the Mediterranean Sea, or even the canals of Venice for a future project.
In Japanese philosophy, which Joëlle cherishes, indigo embodies duality: both color of night and reflection of infinite sky. This tension between darkness and light, between fullness and absence, is found throughout her work. Blue becomes a balance, a space between opposites.
Her practice, at the crossroads of art and architecture, questions the place of body and gaze in space. She creates environments that envelop the public, surfaces to contemplate but also to inhabit with the gaze. Her work is not limited to painting: it becomes installation, landscape, experience.
To paint, for Joëlle, is above all to celebrate life. Each work carries within it a breath of gratitude toward nature, light, time. By giving back part of her sales to biodiversity protection associations, she anchors her artistic gesture in both ethical and poetic commitment.
Between ink and water, between matter and spirit, Joëlle pursues her dialogue with the world. In her crumpled papers, in her infinite blues, something of light lingers, an echo of the living, fragile and eternal.
Dr. Marie Bagi
Director of the Musée Artistes Femmes (MAF)
Published November 4, 2025
