Memento Mori Collage

Romeo Madonna (London, 1987) is a collage artist currently living and working in Florence, Italy. His practice revolves around the act of cutting, layering, and reassembling as a form of reflection. Each fragment becomes a cell of memory — an attempt to reconstruct what the image has already consumed. Through a process that is both methodical and visceral, Madonna treats collage as a space of resistance: against distraction, against excess, against forgetting. Working across analog and digital media, he explores the surface of culture as a kind of living skin — seductive, fragile, and perpetually exposed. The repetition of gestures becomes a private ritual, where control and surrender coexist, and the aesthetic act turns into a way of staying lucid within the noise of contemporary imagery. Time, beauty, identity, and mortality are recurring tensions rather than subjects: they inhabit the work as quiet presences, emerging through matter, cut, and silence. In this sense, Madonna’s collages are not compositions but confessions — attempts to hold together what is destined to fall apart.