MyMicroGallery is pleased to present “The Poetic Power of Collage,” an exhibition curated by Stefania Carrozzini. This show brings together twelve contemporary artists from various backgrounds (Italy, France, Germany, Poland, United States), each possessing a strong identity and having explored the evocative capacities and poetic potential of collage in a journey toward a new significance of the image.

Collage is the medium of our time. It is more than just a technique—from the most traditional to the digital—it is an expressive mode that involves other disciplines such as music, cinema, literature, and fashion.

The combinations between images are infinite and convey unexpected messages with the aim of surprising us: contemporary collage continues to push beyond boundaries, manifesting all of its poetic power. From Cubism to décollage, collage has come a long way. It is no coincidence that its DNA contains the Surrealist aesthetic, which was itself influenced by psychoanalysis: every image leads to something else, like a waking dream, because “non-sense” is the language of the unconscious and of dreams. Randomness and the unexpected play a key role in communication through the juxtaposition of images. Collage thrives on poetic subversion. To subvert (from sub-vertere: to turn from below) means to change the order, to rely on another logic—a mechanism to be understood not so much in a moral or political sense, but rather as the ability to make visible another dimension that goes beyond the ordinary state of things.

This poetic subversion deals with a sense of rebellion against the flow of images that overwhelm us daily—an orgy of ambiguous images that lend themselves easily to manipulation. Collage is a creative way to reinvent a new world. It is the synthetic result of an interactive encounter with reality, a challenge to the fragmentariness of existence. It can be a survival kit that, within the incessant flow of time, manifests the desire of the being to remain the creator of their own life. Although technology today offers numerous means of expression, the number of artists using paper, glue, and scissors has not diminished.

The concept remains the same: to divide, cut, and separate, only to put things back together according to a logic that belongs to poetry. After Pop Art celebrated mass culture for aesthetic purposes, we are now witnessing a sort of explosion of containers and contents: what is at stake is our cultural memory and our destiny as human beings.