On Saturday, 15 November 2025 from 12:00 to 20:00pm, Ex Elettrofonica presents Blue of Noon, a solo exhibition featuring Arianna Marcolin (Schio, 1998). Around 14 new oil paintings on canvas created during her current residence in Paris will be on display.
The exhibition takes its name from a novel Georges Bataille wrote in 1935, a disturbing book that describes a descent into an abyss of unrestrained self-destruction, an immersion into the most unsettling aspects of human nature. The date is no coincidence—just two years earlier, Hitler had come to power in Germany, all of Europe was swept by cold winds of doom, the old world was collapsing, and Bataille’s story seems to echo this upheaval, embodied in the men and women he describes. In the book, the blue of the midday sky acts as a counterpoint to this squalor, or perhaps is the ultimate comfort, the promise and threat of what always remains faithful to itself.
The title of Arianna Marcolin’s exhibition is inspired by this, by the landscape that unites us everywhere, the sky, which represents a search for purity, even spirituality, but is firmly rooted in reality. In fact, in almost all the paintings on display, blue is surrounded by architectural structures, walls, partitions and windows, like a boundary meant to separate, but at the same time to keep a safe distance.
While in Bataille’s book the skies of Paris, London and Madrid act as a backdrop for hopeless events that relentlessly plummet further downward, in Arianna Marcolin’s paintings, the sky is an ambition, a destination of forward-looking momentum. Its tone of dazzling glow discards the melancholic patina covering the unremarkable objects recorded by the artist’s gaze.
Marcolin is outside the timeline, far from judgment, attentive to that tiny detail that finds space in everyone’s daily life, and yet she transmits, with very few details, everything we are and everything we have no intention of giving up.
Arianna Marcolin, b. Schio 1998, studies Painting and Graphic Arts in Venice. In 2022 she was selected for the Bevilacqua la Masa residence in Venice, then relocated to Milan where she participated in residences at Via Farini. In April 2025, she moved to Paris, where she has continued her research in the spaces of Poush Manifesto. Over the years she has been invited to exhibit in various collective shows, including the 102th and the 103th Bevilacqua La Masa shows in Galleria di Piazza Marco in Venice, Vedersi da fuori, vedersi da dentro curated by Angel Moja Garcia, Dall’Antropocene al Biocene with Muse in Trento, L’utile et l’agreable at Poush Manifesto Paris, curated by Yvannoé Kruger. Her solo exhibitions include Promemoria curated by Luisa Amatori in Vicenza, Piazza dei signori, Stanza Iperbarica with Ex Elettrofonica, Cet Amour Caché Casa Capra Schio. In November 2025, she is holding her second solo show with Ex Elettrofonica entitled Blue of Noon, and Never Alone curated by Giacomo Pigliapoco for Casa Museo Testori in Milan.
LOCATION: Ex Elettrofonica – Vicolo di Sant’ Onofrio, 10 Rome
GETTING HERE: Vicolo Sant’Onofrio is just behind Piazza della Rovere, on the Lungotevere, near Santo Spirito in Sassia Hospital and Bambino Gesù Hospital.
INFORMATION: +39 06 64760163, info@exelettrofonica.com, www.exelettrofonica.com
