The Italian Mimmo Rotella saw his poster art as a means of protesting against a conservative society.
He tore posters to pieces, for example ones bearing the faces of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, or Sofia Loren, and assembled the printed shreds of paper to make art. Alongside Raymond Hains and Wolf Vostell, Mimmo Rotella was one of those who, in the 1950s, discovered the so-called décollage--tearing off strips and pieces of posters in public space and turning them into artistic material--as a means of expression.
It was in particular the film posters, the portraits of stars and divas, that appealed to the Italian artist, much like Andy Warhol on the other side of the world. Rotella associated the glamour of the movie industry with the aesthetic of the modern metropolis. He discovered his fascination with the cinema as a child: in his southern Italian hometown of Catanzaro, Rotella struck up a friendship with a movie poster painter. He later enrolled in the art academy in Naples.
During the postwar period, Mimmo Rotella (*1918) produced expressive, abstract paintings, wrote sound poetry, worked with photography and photomontage, composed primitive music, and created assemblages of objects. The French art critic Pierre Restany later wrote that it was above all Rotella's involvement with photography that had a formative influence on him. He deepened his gaze through the medium, looked at Rome through the eye of the camera, eagerly captured the details of the colorful, pulsating skin of the walls.
After journeys to the United States and exhibiting his work there, Rotella settled in Rome. The frayed poster walls at the Piazza del Popolo inspired him to devote himself to the décollage, which ultimately earned him international recognition. He once commented on the choice of his medium by saying that he saw the décollage as a means of protesting against a society that no longer had any interest in changes and grand transformations.
Frayed edges eat their way into perfect portraits and thus shift the raw charm of the postwar city into the picture.Snippets made of words, number, and images join to form accidental tableaus. Rotella used the front and back sides of torn-off posters and converted them into motifs that alternate between abstraction and figuration. Here an arm, there a sea of colorful shreds of paper.
Pierre Restany introduced Mimmo Rotella to the members of the Nouveaux Réalistes, which had constituted itself in 1960 around the first signatories Klein, Raysse, Arman, Dufrêne, Villeglé, Hains, Spoerri, and Tinguely. The group's declared aim was to explore new perspectival approaches to the real. In the period that followed, Rotella participated in exhibitions of the Nouveaux Réalistes and perfected his décollage technique.
His artistic examination of the aesthetic of movies produced for a mass audience made him one of the pioneers of Pop Art in Europe. Like Warhol, Rotella later turned to grim themes. While the former processed plane crashes, car accidents, and suicides he found in the tabloids, Rotella took up the Pope's death or the assassination of John F. Kennedy, for example. He lived in the fast lane; he described his excesses in his 1972 autobiography "Autorella." He remained active artistically all his life; in 1986 he presented performances in Havana during which he tore off strips of poster walls in front of the audience. Rotella died in 2006 at the age of eighty-seven.