Mimmo Rotella -Bandiera-

Mimmo Rotella was born in Catanzaro on 7 October 1918 into a middle-class family, his mother had an established milliner’s business with 12 workers. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, in 1945 he moved to Rome where he frequented the avant-garde of Roman artists gathered in the Forma I Group. Mimmo Rotella began his artistic career as a figurative painter then continuing as an abstract painter -geometric. In the meantime he experiments with phonetic poetry, which he calls epistaltic, and goes to the United States as Artist in Residence at the University of Kansas City. Mimmo Rotella returned to Italy in 1954 and settled in Rome where, during a profound artistic crisis, he had the intuition that advertising posters, with which cities are covered, constitute a form of art. Thus was born the “décollage” which is the opposite of collage. That is, while the collage operates a superimposition of images, the décollage operates a subtraction of the image through tears and abrasions of the figures. The peculiarity of Mimmo Rotella’s work is that he also uses the back of the collage for which the “retro d’affiche” are born. In his early works, Rotella uses public billboards by detaching them from their support, generally of galvanized sheet metal, assembling them on canvas with a few tearing interventions which are in any case not casual but performed with deliberate skill. 1960 is an important year for Rotella as he adheres to the “Nouveau Réalisme” movement, of which the young French critic Pierre Restany is theorist, and then because the subjects of his décollage are the most popular characters of Hollywood cinema or that of Cinecittà. Rotella then passes from the abstract of the first décollage to the patinated figurative, gravure style, where those who are the stars par excellence in the popular imagination are exalted, above all Marilyn and then Mastroianni, Elvis, the circus tiger, etc. However, Rotella does not stop at décollage, in the following years he experiments with the technique of photographic transfer on emulsified canvas commonly called “Mec-Art”. This term means that the work is obtained by mechanical means. At the same time Rotella developed the “Artypos” technique. This technique consists of taking proofs of print waste from print shops, often made up of overlapping images, and gluing them onto canvas. Sometimes after gluing these canvases are laminated obtaining a more pleasant and captivating result. In the 1970s Rotella experimented with two new techniques, the “frottage” and the “effaçage”. In the frottage Rotella works images taken from magazines with nitro solvents and then transfers these images, largely discolored, onto a white sheet of paper by means of tracing; on the the same sheet also transfers several images. In the effaçage Rotella treats with solvents some pages cut out of magazines for which the image undergoes a discoloration until part of it disappears. Subsequently these pages are glued on canvas. Rotella keeps these works in the drawer until the 2004, the year in which he showed them at our gallery, therefore it was decided to organize an exhibition which was the first ever of this kind of work and which would be inaugurated in December 2005, therefore shortly before his departure. Rotella’s new experiments, namely the “Blanks”, the “Overpaintings” and the “Lamiere”. The blanks consist in covering the image with plain sheets ochromes leaving voids according to Rotella’s artistic perception, the overpaintings are instead graphic interventions, made with acrylic colors, on the décollage. Lastly, the metal sheets are décollages performed directly on the sheet metal support of the advertising billboards which often take the form of the back of the poster. Rotella died in Milan on 8 January 2006 while his exhibition activity was in full swing. During his career, Rotella participated in various international events such as the Venice Biennials of 1964, 1978 and 2000, the Rome Quadrennial of 1965 and others. Public and private galleries dedicate many exhibitions to him and his works become part of important museums and private collections all over the world.