Katia Bornoz - painter
- Jan 26
- 3 min read
Katia Bornoz, gesture as breath
For Katia Bornoz, everything begins with movement. Born in Lausanne to a Venetian father and an Alsatian mother, she grew up between two cultures, two sensibilities, and found her language in the body very early. At five, she entered Simone Sutter's school, where she discovered classical ballet. This first apprenticeship was an adventure of the body, marked by rigor and demands. In Zurich then Paris, she perfected her craft before joining the Grand Theatre of Dijon. The stage then became her vital space, a territory of expression where she transformed emotions into gestures.
When her parents divorced and her father distanced himself, dance became a refuge, an outlet. Each arabesque, each repeated step connected her to what remained alive within her. For ten years, she danced professionally, then an injury to her left knee, on the eve of her thirtieth birthday, abruptly interrupted this momentum. She had to reinvent herself.
The reconversion first happened in another world: that of Swatch, where she participated in the launch of the Flick Flack, an emblematic watch of the 1990s. Six years spent in this company forged another form of rigor, but art was never far away. After the birth of her first son, Katia devoted herself to her family while nourishing her creative curiosity. She undertook training in interior design, took evening classes for three years, and obtained a certificate in interior decoration, layout and furniture, as well as a diploma in set design and decoration from the M. J. Dubois school in Lausanne. In parallel, she learned patinated furniture techniques: working with pigments, binders, textures. From there was born her company Rêves d'intérieurs (Interior Dreams), which she ran for ten years.
But painting ultimately imposed itself as a return to the essential. The passage from object to flat support was a liberation. The technique, acquired over the years, served a more instinctive gesture. Katia collects pigments, knows them, smells them, mixes them. She took workshops with Jacques Walter, who rented her his studio for a time, before settling into her own in Pully. It is there, in that light, that she paints.
Her canvases always begin flat, on the floor. The gesture unfolds there—wide, ample, almost choreographic. Then she straightens the canvas, confronts it with verticality, as if to test the gravity of movement. The body goes into action, rediscovers the energy of dance: the tension of muscle, the breathing of rhythm, the release of breath. Movement is her primary material.
She speaks of letting go, but it's a controlled letting go, the kind we learn by repeating, falling, starting again. Painting becomes a silent dance. The brush follows the music she listens to, her gesture responds to the beats of a piece, to an interior pulsation. "The first thing that animates me is movement," she says.
Katia experiments: acrylic, India inks, colored pencils, pure pigments. She loves feeling the density of vine earth, the luminosity of a deep blue. Her canvases are born from these variations of textures and intensities. Matter is worked like skin, sometimes scraped, sometimes polished, always in movement.
The former dancer rediscovers the stage here: the studio becomes a platform, the canvas a partner. Gesture is breath, incarnation, dialogue between body and matter. Each line is a breath, each trace, a pulsation.
The discipline of dance forged in her an acute awareness of the right gesture. She knows that freedom is only obtained through repetition, that letting go is a fruit of rigor. Her canvases bear this tension, between precision and spontaneity, between structure and flow. They vibrate with organic, fluid, almost choreographic energy.
Katia often quotes Rainer Maria Rilke, whose words guide her process: "Your doubt itself can become a good thing if you educate it." Doubt, for her, is not paralyzing: it is driving, a breath that pushes to search further. To paint, for her, is to question this doubt, to inhabit it, to transform it into movement.
Thus, gesture becomes language, movement, writing. In each of her works, we find the rhythm of the body, the musicality of line, the energy of life in perpetual imbalance. Each canvas is a crossing, between dance and painting, between abandon and mastery, between body memory and the present of gesture.
For Katia, painting is dance continued by other means. An art of breath and beginning again. A sensitive dialogue between body, matter, and light.
Dr. Marie Bagi
Director of the Musée Artistes Femmes (MAF)
Published November 4, 2025
