From April 15 to July 4, 2026, the artist Romane de Watteville, a Fine Arts Bachelor graduate, presents the exhibition I'll miss you when I scroll away at the Istituto Svizzero in Milan.
On the occasion of the Milan Design Week, the Istituto Svizzero shows the exhibition I'll miss you when I scroll away by Romane de Watteville , a project that blends contemporary art and design. This installation, specially designed for the spaces of Istituto Svizzero, draws inspiration from a traditional element of interior design: the folding screen.
The artist extends, multiplies and amplifies the object’s dual function as both a narrative and architectural device, associating it with contemporary modes of experiencing digital content: scrolling, reproducibility, and accumulation. Painted on both sides and depicting the aftermath of a party, these modular structures echo the narrative logic of online scrolling while drawing on pre-digital, sequential forms of storytelling. The exhibition environment becomes a hybrid space, in which design is understood as a critical field capable of interrogating the desires, excesses and accelerated temporalities that structure contemporary aesthetic and affective experience.
Romane de Watteville’s work sways between the pleasure of aesthetic saturation and a vertiginous descent into a digital rabbit hole. Her figurative paintings draw from a wide range of sources, spanning art-historical iconographies, cinematic motifs and imagery drawn from fashion and design. Extracted, disassociated and recombined on canvas, her subjects seem to be filtered through the fragmentation of screen-based culture, producing an overloaded, subtly hallucinatory perceptual field.
I’ll miss you when I scroll away
15 April – 4 July 2026
Istituto Svizzero, Via del Vecchio Politecnico 3, Milan
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Romane de Watteville, installation view, I’ll miss you when I scroll away, Istituto Svizzero, Milano, 2026 ©Giulio Boem