Professional / Press
Press
This page gathers the full interview published in Nevad'Art, along with the complete set of critical perspectives on Katherine Roumanoff's work — articles, curator and journalist quotes. A shorter excerpt is also presented at the end of the Professional page.
Press releases
Carte Blanche — Ville de Trélazé, February 13–March 1, 2026
Katherine Roumanoff — Textile portraits of the feminine – Inner gardens. Carte Blanche exhibition, Les Anciennes Écuries, contemporary art space, Trélazé, France. Opening Thursday 12 February 2026 at 6:30pm. Open 2:30pm–6:30pm (closed Mondays). Free entry.
At the heart of the Carte Blanche exhibition, Katherine Roumanoff's textile portraits gather over thirty years of research around the face, the feminine and inner landscapes. Here, the face becomes intimate territory, a surface of projection and a place of memory, but also a living space where the human and the vegetal resonate with one another.
The artist cuts directly into the material, with no preliminary sketch. Figures emerge as a dream, a sensation or a buried memory would surface. Every fabric carries a story, every pattern a memory, every colour an emotional vibration. These portraits do not describe identifiable individuals, but states of being, ways of inhabiting the world, inner climates.
In the most recent works, hair, headdresses and adornments are laden with foliage, flowers and abundant patterns. This visual abundance becomes the sign of a life force, an organic power running through both the vegetal and the human. The figures appear crowned with nature like a second skin — free, vibrant, intuitive.
These vegetal adornments evoke rebirth, regeneration, a vital drive despite the wounds. Colour fills the space, material overflows, and each work affirms a persistent joy, a way for the living to keep growing. Ornament becomes language. It speaks of a sensitive reconciliation with nature, an awareness of the body as a form of growth, metamorphosis and cycle.
The portraits are made of repurposed textiles: decorative fabrics, fragments of furnishings, materials laden with memory. Katherine Roumanoff extends their history, offering them a new trajectory. The fabrics' past becomes present energy.
These figures speak of the living part in each of us. The part that persists, holds on, rises again. Behind every face, something is still growing, still seeking the light, still inventing its own blossoming.
Portraits stitched with meaning and light
Interview with Katherine Roumanoff — Nevad'Art, autumn 2025
For thirty years, Katherine Roumanoff has lived and worked on the banks of the Loire, near Angers. A multidisciplinary artist — by turns designer, illustrator and author — she draws on her deep love of fabric to compose figures in search of reconciliation.
Katherine, to have material to create with, you collect fabrics from all over the world. How was this passion for textiles born?
I carry a deep, long-standing love for fabric. In the 1970s, my parents imported oriental clothing and decorative objects; I wore embroidered quilted vests, and played hopscotch on Afghan rugs. I am fascinated by patterns, by arabesques that echo plant forms. Symmetry sometimes, repetition always, the solids, the voids, the fine lines. Materials can give back extraordinary colours. Fabric also speaks of human beings, of know-how, of cultures, of transmission, of intentions, of wealth, of a display of opulence or restraint. Textile is a language. From birth to shroud, it envelops us, protects us, accompanies us.
You gave up your paintbrushes thirty years ago — can fabric express everything?
As a designer, I drew textile patterns, but it all began when I created theatre costumes. I linked colours, materials and patterns to the characters' personalities. The costumes served as set and message, also conveying the director's intentions. From that experience I kept the idea of a figure whose personality is revealed through the choice of materials, colours and patterns. I had built my textile palette from upholstery fabric houses such as Edmond Petit, Manuel Canovas, Boussac, Rubelli, Pierre Frey. Impossible to throw away the offcuts of these true marvels: it's with them that I began creating textile portraits.
I cut directly into the material, like Matisse with his cut-outs, with no preliminary drawing. And I assemble. What's practical with collage, of course, is that you can try many things before finding a composition.
A simple piece of fabric carries a multitude of information. Velvet reflects colour differently depending on its orientation, unlike a weave that absorbs light. Fabrics also carry the era in which they were invented: a toile de Jouy transports us to the boudoir of a château, small geometric, repetitive patterns take us to a more recent era. The juxtaposition of shapes cut in small pieces or large masses, the mixing of patterns, colours arranged in tonal ranges or in tension, offer infinite possibilities — I question the material and its codes and complete it with touches of paint.
You are a hypnotherapist. Does your hypnosis practice influence your work?
Yes, on several levels. When I create, I am probably close to a trance state: I have the sensation of letting myself be guided by the materials, the patterns, the colours.
Hypnosis has also let me deepen my understanding of the mechanisms of the unconscious, of buried memories, of transgenerational wounds. The face reveals what cannot be said, what is hidden. It speaks, in spite of us, of fears, desires and invisible forces that run through us and shape us. It says more than we are conscious of. What interests me is inscribing on the canvas the dense, fleeting instant when the soul escapes.
On the personal-therapy side, my approach resembles an attempt at reunification. I take all sorts of scattered materials and turn them into a harmonious whole. It's a kind of spiritual quest: taking the scattered into account and creating a composition that gathers and traces a path, a thought, an invitation to an inner journey.
Your Oppressed Women series blends concept, narrative and emotion?
Indeed — I created three-dimensional textile figures which I placed inside transparent pouches before crushing them until they "bled". It is symbolic of the oppressions inflicted on women everywhere in the world. When I remove the air, as for preserving meat, I witness a violent, inexorable metamorphosis. The faces wither, wrinkle, freeze under the plastic film. I then free some of them to offer them a form of resilience. I pin them like butterflies before framing them. The process becomes as interesting as the result. These oppressed, then pinned, women are at once decorative and conceptual.
How does the public receive this new concept?
With a great deal of emotion. This collection of oppressed women leaves no one indifferent. I showed it for the first time at an exhibition last summer. Women cried, some recognised themselves and confided their own stories to me. I had prepared texts to present my approach, but the works speak for themselves. We carry the traces of our past, of what has gripped us, but also of our hopes. This series is a continuation of my work, because I have never wanted to say anything else.
The question that arises is what comes next: how do we live with visible or invisible wounds? Can we heal from a trauma, repair ourselves, stitch our wounds back together and move forward? My figures stand at a crossroads. Will they sink, rebuild, or even rise from their ashes? I'm calling on the strength each of us can reach within.
Does the psychological dimension take up all the space in your singular research?
The psychological dimension lies in my deepest nature. By staging figures alone, in relation to nature, to themselves, or in pairs, I am interested in the relationship we hold with ourselves, in our inner dialogues, in our hesitations of the heart. I seek to reveal, to uncover the mystery of how we function. The bird, for instance — in my bird series — represents the emergence of an idea coming from within, like a revelation, or from outside, like a new proposal that will spark upheaval. It's a message: everything is at play at all times, so anything is possible.
Ultimately, my work is a search, and this search is a journey — the one each of us takes over a lifetime to draw closer and closer to ourselves.
I hope my works give off a certain beauty — that of harmony, of calm, of serenity — as well as a poetry, that of the pleasure of existing in openness to the world. That is what I wish for everyone: that each person slips inside themselves and accepts their own multitude, their infinite inner richness, and that this acceptance opens every door.
Critical perspectives
"Fabric has always been her passion, and it replaced Katherine Roumanoff's paint tubes. The first offcuts that gave her the idea for her portraits lay at the foot of the theatre costumes for The Miser she was making at the time; captivated by these pieces of colour and light, she made her first textile painting from them, depicting Harpagon with the very scraps of his costume. (…) Just as sensitive to what these very high quality upholstery fabrics express — recovered, or gifted to her — Katherine Roumanoff finds herself in resonance with each one: an era, a social history, a manufacturing context, a printing or weaving method (…) This journey into the artist's world takes on its true colours at the heart of her studio, amid offcuts scattered on the floor and sketches that sometimes outlined her intentions."— Nevad'Art, autumn 2025
"Sculpted canvases halfway between painting and sculpture, a mixed technique rooted in the contemporary art of recycling. A perilous, audacious exercise where the eye, if it looks closely, finds the identity of obsolete, abandoned objects reanimated within a work of porcelain whiteness. From there the portrait takes on its full splendour, revealing only the poetry-filled expression of the magnified face. Katherine Roumanoff's studio, a true Ali Baba's cave, overflows with resources of every kind, patiently clustered, awaiting their next rebirth."— Véronique Maksud, journalist, Burda magazine
"The artist's colour choices are bold, layered and charged with emotion. There is a clear understanding of how floral motifs and saturated tones interact to create visual harmony, even within a rich and complex surface. In terms of form, the overall compositions reflect a keen sense of shape and balance, despite the complexity of the textile layering. The repetition and variation of floral, geometric and figurative motifs create a visual rhythm, allowing the eye to travel across the work fluidly without being overwhelmed. Texture is the most convincing technical element. The artist masterfully handles fabric, both as colour and as material, creating a surface that is both tactile and painterly. The choice of medium — likely a blend of cotton, silk, brocade and possibly recycled textiles — reinforces the work's cultural and emotional charge. In my view, the strength of the portfolio lies in its emotional narrative through materiality, and in its ability to reinvent figurative portraiture through textile, in a way that is both culturally resonant and formally innovative. The artist's work speaks to a broad and demanding audience, notably collectors and curators of textile and fibre art, particularly those seeking works that combine craftsmanship with conceptual depth."— Ainhoa Fernández, curator and journalist, April 2025
"Katherine Roumanoff's work comes from far away; it was not born of nothing, but of a long lineage found in the decorative and fine arts, at the crossroads of great civilisations and ancient cultures: traces of it can be found in pre-Columbian art, in Native American art, in ancient and contemporary Japanese art (notably in the work of Ayako Miyawaki), in the learned techniques of American quilts, among outsider artists devoted to arte povera, and closer to us in the cubist collages of Picasso and Braque, Matisse's cut-outs of course, Sonia Delaunay's textile assemblages, the surrealist sewing works of Bona de Mandiargues, and many others. Katherine Roumanoff achieves here a new variation on this art — naive and forever original — where her virtuoso hands excel, but where other, deeper, more spiritual stakes are above all at play. There is, undoubtedly, a light, a clarity, a naivety close to its root meaning — that is, close to birth — that her face betrays. Katherine Roumanoff's "second profession" is helping her patients reach calm and serenity. From there, one better understands her gallery of portraits: emerging from childhood, from a generous spring, she delivers whole swathes of a time never gone but dormant within us. Katherine Roumanoff is what I would call "an awakener of childhood": with scissors and scraps of fabric enhanced with paint, and with humility, she instead re-weaves our lives, stitches them back together in her own way, and returns us to the joy of our first days, to wonder and to their innocence, without ever deceiving us about the inevitable cruelty of passing time."— Alain Vircondelet, biographer and art historian, February 2019
"There is a Russian enchantment in this work... like the one the young Kandinsky revealed to us on arriving in Paris. A whimsical poetics... a kind of Slavic baroque mixed with Fauvist colours. Matisse, Van Dongen, Gauguin... for Katherine Roumanoff, they represent a shower of reminiscences. Had she lived at the dawn of the twentieth century, she might have invented collage before Picasso, used wallpaper before Braque. But perhaps not. The world she creates is intimate, tactile, feminine. Hundreds of figures wander through her imagination. Rarely full-length, almost always facing forward, one by one, she places them in separate rectangles and squares, as on Russian icons. Their charming existence is made of brightly coloured pieces of textile, cut then rejoined, enhanced with paint. Small distorted faces, mismatched eyes, quaint attire and attributes — her figures have the look of astonishing puppets carrying countless secrets within them. Cut out, layered, the materials Katherine Roumanoff uses combine an irregular geometry with a poetry of colour. More than plain paint, the pieces of fabric, often printed with floral motifs, theatricalise her figures. They become palpable, moving and picturesque. Melancholy, flair, freshness…"— Iléana Cornea, art critic, Paris, January 2007
"Katherine Roumanoff's canvases reveal the complexity of human beings caught in a dense and fleeting instant. One can read a destiny in them: traces of childhood through to the marks of maturity, the back-and-forth between secret desires, imagined happiness and the sudden halts of despair. Her portraits reflect back to us what we are within ourselves, the symphony of our emotions and our secret wounds. The thickness of the assembled textile pieces traces out as many dreams and desires. Like these figures, we are made of pieces and fragments assembled over the course of our history. Our actions and thoughts carry us sometimes toward greater coherence, sometimes toward greater conflict, and everything that happens is inscribed on the canvas of our life and our character. It is the whole mystery of life laid bare."— Colette Roumanoff, author