Noel de Lesseps: Twilight Chymical Conjunction

A town flickers into being. Rooftops tilt at uneasy angles. People bend to tend their garden. Then it all starts to dissolve, as if it had never really been there in the first place.

In Noel de Lesseps’ Twilight Chymical Conjunction, all grasps on reality come loose: scenes crowd, overlap, and press against each other — loose, tangled, tapestry-like. A lone wolf howls at the moon. A giant sets their hands to purple soil. A knight appears, but instead of conquering, he gets swallowed into the painting itself.

In Holly Eclipse (2025), the heart of the show, villagers labor beneath a navy-blue sun that hangs low and strange. A dragon’s tail becomes a river as you follow it. Smoke from a firecracker thins and twists into a winding stream that spills down from the mountains. Above it all, another town, darker, quieter, stretches across the night sky. Has the world doubled back on itself?

The visions, which are more akin to Breughel’s scenes of peasant life than Bosch's nightmares, don’t promise relief. There is no quest to follow or a happy ending to hope for. Instead, there’s just a shifting, shimmering place to drift while the dangers of the world outside the frame grow harder to ignore.

Noel de Lesseps (b. 1996, Southampton, NY) lives and works in Brooklyn. His father is a French count, and his mother is LuAnn de Lesseps — the singer, socialite, and Real Housewives star. Self-taught, he has maintained a dedicated studio practice since 2017. He’s also an avid skateboarder, a detail that makes more sense the longer you look at the work.