LAGADO. Pasquale De Sensi on view at Mondoromulo Gallery

On Sunday, April 26 at 6:00 PM, the solo exhibition Lagado by Pasquale De Sensi opens at Mondoromulo, a gallery in Castelvenere (BN). On display are the collages of the Lamezia-based artist—works that, starting from the title, evoke the events narrated by Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift.

At the Academy of Lagado, a machine is capable of generating knowledge through the mechanical and random combination of words. De Sensi’s work reverses this mechanism: collage is not random generation, but recombination guided by visual memory. The machine of Lagado can exist only because it is operated by an artist—someone who chooses, who orders, who is accountable for their own system of meaning.

“Three years after the beautiful exhibition Blues for a Dead Giant, which offered a sharp critique of capitalism, I am pleased to bring De Sensi back to the gallery,” says gallerist Garofano. “His work is a journey through art history, rich in references, and through anthropology; but it is also, and above all, a political presence. The artist consciously exercises and expresses his being and acting in the world. In Lagado we can once again read a critique—always ironic—and a grotesque narrative about the abandonment of experiential knowledge in favor of an artificial intelligence. The artist possesses all the means to generate signs and meanings; and we, by looking, can generate further knowledge through his hand.”

The exhibition is curated by Francesco Creta, who offers a critical reading of the work: “The works on display traverse the entire history of Western art, from Hieronymus Bosch to The Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp, without the trajectory ever becoming linear. Each fragment carries its own history and, at the same time, detaches from it, undergoing a semantic redefinition that does not ask permission of the original. Every appropriated image belongs to a layer, has its own rules of formation, and the collage does not translate it: it presents it in its discontinuity, both legible and irreducible at once. The themes and titles of De Sensi’s production interact with one another, constructing a coherent internal narrative, while at the same time retaining the matrix of the thousand unfinished projects of the Academy imagined by Jonathan Swift.”

Lagado will be on view at Mondoromulo until June 26.