On the occasion of Milan Art Week and Milan Design Week, the Swiss Institute presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Italy of the artist Romane de Watteville (1993, Lausanne). The exhibition takes the form of an environmental installation specially developed for the spaces of the Swiss Institute in Milan, entitled I’ll miss you when I scroll away.

De Watteville's work is divided between the pleasure provoked by its aesthetic saturation and the sensation of a vertiginous descent into a digital rabbit hole. His figurative paintings voraciously draw from a wide range of sources, ranging from art history iconographies, cinematic motifs, to images of fashion and design taken from daily visual experience. Extracted, dissociated, and recombined on the canvas, his subjects seem filtered through the fragmentation of digital culture, producing an overloaded and subtly hallucinatory perceptual field.

De Watteville's exhibition at the Swiss Institute includes an installation of disproportionately long modular screens, articulating a series of labyrinthine walls in space. Painted on both sides, the screens echo the narrative logic of online scrolling, simultaneously evoking forms of pre-digital progressive storytelling.

The folding paintings seem to convey the end of a party, the muffled time that follows a collective celebration. The scene is dominated by what remains of a banquet, scattered haphazardly with the remnants of a sumptuous dinner, now trampled by the heels of anonymous protagonists and inhabited by grotesque figures, signaling that the time to celebrate is over. The opulence of the remains is meticulously rendered by the artist, whose visual vocabulary overlays an almost late Baroque mannerism with a markedly cinematic compositional sensitivity.

The "after-party" scenario evokes a sense of excess that leads to entropy, on the edge between prosperity and self-indulgence, celebration and collapse. The accumulation of abandoned objects, images, and memories acquires an unexpected autonomy, revealing the emotional residues that remain attached to things once we have left them. What emerges is a form of instant nostalgia: a sense of loss shaped by the ruthless temporality of consumption, where images and affections flow continuously, without us being given the chance to encounter them a second time.