The Collage Show

Camden Image Gallery is pleased to announce “The Collage Show” a group exhibition curated by Stefania Carrozzini featuring eight artists from: Italy, Serbia, New Zealand, Switzerland, United States. From cinema to fashion, from art to music: the multiculturalism world that we live in has become such a sort of cut and past culture, so this trend is one of the most contemporary attitudes. Up to the Internet world. This technique teaches the way to the freedom to build our own intellectual world and to experience information simultaneously.
Artists love the collage because it is simple, inexpensive, with apparently guaranteed results, at least formally. The next difference is the talent of the artists, their ability to associate disparate images, creating unexpected worlds. Contemporary artists are updating the modernist tradition with new tactics and new media.
It all began in the early twentieth century between 1911 and 1912, years in which Picasso produced “Still Life with Cane Chair”. He was the first to replace paint with paper, or better with Tarpaulin. The collage then has had over the years an evolution, from Boccioni’s theories of mixed media sculpture, and then Dada with Schwitters, Haussmann and Arp who exploited the infinite possibilities of photomontage. The surrealists then give voice and expression to the unconscious, the irrational floating submerged in a changing world.
Over the years the collage will become an acquired language for décollage artist Mimmo Rotella who came to reverse the process, tearing away or removing pieces from an original image. For many artists working in collage the traditional approach remains a source of perpetual fascination.
Shuffling of reality is not just the prerogative of art, think of fashion that “pastes” past and future, the music that mixes music of diverse cultures that are only apparently incompatible, to dance with the fusion style. Yes, because in our culture the key word is “fusion.” The “cut and paste” is the Internet language. Think of Facebook or Instagram, large containers for billions of photos, movies, confessions, news, fake news, lies. Is a symbol of a whole world and, at the same time, it appears as its opposite as an immense river that passes, but also overwhelms. And everything is already there, within reach, no need to create anything new, because you have the illusion of grabbing reality, to reorganize the story, add another sense to the visible.Perhaps the collage is one of all of the techniques that most humanistic, in that it binds us to this with the possibility of an overall view of life; it is a perceptual mode that mimics the speed of thought, trains us to the synthesis and expands our consciousness.
The reorganization by countless fragments of the visible is the trend of the future and it will be the ability to choose, to eliminate the superfluous to impose a style beyond all styles, in an aesthetic view where beauty rhymes with truth and simplicity.

Stefania Carrozzini