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Mimmo Rotella / 1918-2006 / Viso trasparente / 1961 / Decollage on canvas

Mimmo Rotella debuted as a painter in the late 1940s but his art soon took alternative directions with phonetic work in which words - including invented words - and sounds of all sorts combined in what he himself defined as “pistaltica poetry” in a Manifesto written in 1949 . Increasingly convinced that painting’s potential for development was a thing of the past, he directed his interest at contemporary objects and, above all, at the advertising images then invading urban spaces. This was the beginning of dècollage, in which he ripped posters from walls and applied them to his canvases. This work was exhibited for the first time in 1955 and became a distinctive feature of his work. Whilst Rotella paid great attention to formal, colour and compositional aspects in his work. his work rapidly moved from generally abstract direction to visual representations in which advertising products and the stars appearing in film posters were increasingly recognisable to the extent of often being cited in the titles of the work. A friend of Pierre Restany, Rotella was recruited into the Nouveau Réalistes group in 1960, a group of artists who worked individually and maintained considerable stylistic and operational differences but shared a practice which the French critic summarised as “poetic recycling of the urban, industrial and advertisement reality”.