Mimmo Rotella

(Catanzaro 1918 – Milan 2006)

Venetian Nostalgia, 1962

Decollage on canvas, 38 x 30 cm

Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art “Filippo de Pisis,” inv. 8272

After his studies in Naples, Mimmo Rotella settled in Rome in 1945, developing abstract-geometric production in parallel with experimentation with phonetic poetry, which he called “epistaltic.” The turning point that marks the beginning of the artist’s reflection on the function of art in his own time dates back to 1953. Rotella identifies the advertising poster as the ideal means of expression of urban and popular contemporaneity: the famous décollage that recreate the unexpected and liberating gesture of tearing, tearing or scraping the “skin of the walls.” Shreds of posters taken from the urban context are glued to the canvas, replacing pictorial drafts. Initially, the dense weaving of the “tears” gives rise to abstract images, revealing affinities with Alberto Burri’s informal and material research. Toward the end of the 1950s, a tangency with neo-Dadaist and pop art poetics that focus on the society of the image is rather felt. Rotella begins to leave the subjects of the posters recognizable, selecting them precisely on the basis of their iconicity: the series Cinecittà offers a gallery of movie stars’ faces taken from movie posters. Venetian Nostalgia, dated 1962, reflects the crucial phase of joining the French movement Nouveau Réalisme, promoted by critic Pierre Restany

. Rotella utilizza frammenti dell’affiche di Les Parisiennes, an episodic Italian-French film released that year and directed by Jacques Poitrenaud, Michel Boisrond, Claude Barma and Marc Allégret. An image shredded by the chaos of urban life intermittently returns the iconic force of the myth of the “dolce vita.” Compared to the impersonal portraits of consumer society offered by American pop art, Rotella’s work declares its fragile and precarious character, more akin to European research.