15.7″x15.7″; collage on paper; 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Pasquale De Sensi: Lagado
at Mondoromulo Arte Contemporanea in Castelvenere, Benevento, Italy
26 April-26 June 2026
After three years, Pasquale De Sensi, the artist from Lamezia Terme returns to the gallery with a new series of collages that take as their starting point one of the most famous places in satirical literature, Lagado, featured in Gulliver’s Travels. In the Academy of Lagado, which Jonathan Swift constructs in Gulliver’s Travels, a machine produces knowledge through the mechanical and random combination of words—a scathing critique of the rationalist claim to reduce thought to procedure. De Sensi takes Swift’s device and turns it over. Collage, in operation, is a recombination according to criteria, the deliberate architecture of visual memory. Lagado’s panel can exist only because it is manipulated by an artist: someone who chooses, who orders, who is accountable for his own system of meaning.
12.6″x19″; collage on paper; 2026. Courtesy of the artist.
The works on display span the entire history of modern art, from Bosch to Duchamp’s Large Glass, without the procedure ever being linear. Each fragment carries its own history and simultaneously detaches itself from it, subjecting itself to a semantic redetermination that does not ask permission from the original. Each image selected belongs to a layer, has its own rules of formation, and collage does not translate it: it exposes it in its discontinuity, simultaneously traces it, and contaminates it. The themes and titles of De Sensi’s production intertwine, constructing a coherent internal narrative, and at the same time preserving the matrix of the thousand unfinished projects of the Academy imagined by Swift.
Curated by Francesco Creta.
(text adapted from material provided by the gallery)
INFORMATION
Mondoromulo Arte Contemporanea
Strada Nazionale Sannitica, 169
82037 Castelvenere, Benevento, Italy
+39 339 826 4803
Hours:
Thursday-Friday, 4-7PM
Saturday, 9AM-Noon & 4-7PM