MARIE DE VILLEPIN

White noise is what remains when every voice speaks at once.

Within the faded walls of San Vittore, Marie de Villepin’s paintings emerge like unstable transmissions suspended between disappearance and persistence. They are fragments, afterimages, emotional frequencies lingering long after the original signal has faded.

Detached from its sacred function, the church remains inhabited by erosion, silence, and memory. The exhibition does not attempt to restore the sacred, but to explore what survives after collapse: traces of instinct, emotion, and human presence resisting erasure.

Monumental canvases unfold throughout the space like unstable emotional landscapes, oscillating between apparition and disappearance. Smoke, ash, spectral caves, scorched atmospheres, and dissolving forms recur throughout the works. Nothing fully settles into narrative. Images emerge only to disappear again.

New York inhabits these paintings like a hidden frequency. Marie de Villepin lived there for more than a decade, and the city left deep traces in her visual language: not simply through its architecture, but through its sound. Sirens cutting through the night, the metallic percussion of subway platforms, the electrical hum of delis and laundromats at 3 a.m., fragments of conversations dissolving into traffic noise, helicopters circling above the Hudson, jazz escaping through half-open doors in the Lower East Side, the static of summer heat rising between buildings. New York is never silent; it breathes through saturation. That density profoundly shaped her relationship to painting. Her canvases function like urban soundscapes translated into colour, gesture, and movement: layers of interruptions, accelerations, and collisions between solitude and collective energy. One senses the ghost of downtown rehearsal studios, late-night drives through Manhattan after rain, the grain of old cinema screens, the violence and tenderness of a city permanently on the verge of overload. In White Noise, New York reappears not as a place to depict, but as an atmosphere, a psychic weather, a restless pulse running beneath the paintings.

At the center of the exhibition appears a single figurative work: a feral, hallucinatory creature functioning as a fractured self portrait of the artist.

It is the only recognisable body in the exhibition.

Drawing from her parallel practice as both musician and painter, Marie approaches painting through rhythm, repetition, and tonal variation. Sound structures the works as much as image. The paintings are not only meant to be seen, but almost heard.

White noise is the hum of a world saturated beyond meaning.

Set in Milan, a city shaped by centuries of beauty, ruin, and reinvention, White Noise becomes a contemplation of what continues to resonate long after certainty has dissolved.

“I wanted the paintings to feel like signals still breathing long after the world that produced them had disappeared.”

— Marie de Villepin