Romane de Watteville: I’ll miss you when I scroll away

On the occasion of Milano Art Week and Milano Design Week, Istituto Svizzero presents the first solo exhibition in Italy by Romane de Watteville (1993, Lausanne), in the form of an environmental installation specifically designed for the Milanese spaces and titled “I’ll miss you when I scroll away”, curated by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti.

De Watteville’s work oscillates between the pleasure of aesthetic saturation and a vertiginous descent into digital culture. Her figurative paintings draw from art-historical iconographies, cinematic motifs, and everyday imagery from fashion and design. Extracted, disassociated and recombined on canvas, her subjects reflect the fragmentation of screen-based culture, producing an overloaded, subtly hallucinatory perceptual field.

The exhibition features disproportionately long folding screens creating a maze of walls across the space. Painted on both sides, the structures echo the narrative logic of online scrolling while referencing pre-digital sequential storytelling. The folding paintings depict the aftermath of a party: remnants of a lavish banquet trampled by anonymous figures and visited by grotesque presences. Combining late-Baroque mannerism with cinematic compositional sensibility, the artist renders a “post-party” scenario of excess and entropy, where discarded objects, images, and memories unexpectedly gain agency.

What emerges is a form of instant nostalgia: a sense of loss shaped by the relentless temporality of consumption, where images and affections scroll past, never to be encountered again.