Mimmo Rotella

A transgressive life, that of Mimmo Rotella, which perfectly fits  the imagination of the 'artist's life' that we all possess within us. Mimmo was so eccentric that he inspired the hilarious protagonist of 'Un Americano a Roma' played by Alberto Sordi; in fact, in 1953, just returning from Kansas City, Mimmo wandered around Rome dressed in a very conspicuous, exaggeratedly American style. Such a distinctive characterization that Lucio Fulci, the scriptwriter of the film and a friend of the artist, didn't let slip by.

Born in Catanzaro on October 7, 1918, Mimmo Rotella left his home region Calabria to move to Rome in 1945. In that year, his figurative journey began: with pastels, pencils, and oil, he developed an abstract-geometric style inspired by Kandinsky and Mondrian. But suddenly, at the beginning of the 1950s, something radically changes in his artistic discourse. Already in 1949, Mimmo began to feel some dissatisfaction to which he reacted by composing phonetic poems formed from invented words, whistles, sounds, and onomatopoeic iterations, which he himself termed with the neologism 'epistaltic poems,' drafting a veritable literary manifesto.

After his first solo exhibition in 1951 held at the Chiurazzi Gallery in Rome and the acquisition of a scholarship that led him, between universities and exhibitions, to Kansas City, Mimmo reached a turning point, which coincided with the year 1953. At that moment, the artist understood that the pictorial medium was no longer suitable for his poetry through what he himself defines as 'Zen enlightenment': the discovery of the advertising poster as an artistic expression. Thus, décollage was born, a technique that led the artist to tear posters from the walls of Rome and paste them onto canvas, overlapping them. In reality, the first tear made by Mimmo Rotella, more than a manifesto, is perpetuated towards traditional painting. He invents a way to destroy and wound the image that actually exalts it and makes it unique.

Therefore, in addition to the profession of a 'performer' obtained thanks to his epistaltic poems, Rotella becomes a true 'reporter': he is an involuntary chronicler and a truthful eye on the cultural climate of his time, precisely through the introduction of advertising, film, and political posters into museums and galleries. A climate based on worldly mythologies: from Marilyn to blonde beer, from religion to adult cinema, from video to political struggle, all filtered through the artist's violent and voracious gesture. And it is precisely on the mythology revolving around cinema stars that his first series, 'Cinecittà,' 1958, is based.

Rotella is a 'disorganizer' who accepts chaos, highlighting the promiscuous aspect of the image based on a multiple and simultaneous vision where the desire to move away from the unitary and structural aspect prevails to enter an open field, with deviations, overlaps, tears, and cancellations. Mimmo Rotella's goal is to demonstrate that a small shift is enough for the most banal things to become unprecedented, for the image to release magic.

In 1961, invited by the critic Pierre Restany, he joined the Nouveau Réalisme movement and three years later moved to Paris, where he developed the 'Mec-Art' process (an abbreviation of mechanical art), projecting negative images onto emulsion-coated canvases, exhibiting works for the first time in 1965 at Restany's Galerie J. He continued his research by creating the Artypo series, selected typographic printing experiments freely pasted on canvas. In 1975, he created the first Plastiforme, torn posters placed on a polyurethane support.

Mimmo Rotella's most recent works are nothing but a self-analysis of those ancient ones. According to the artist, this is the right way to age: not by updating, but by contributing to clarify the meaning of one's own work. All his work is actually destined to endure and is the ultimate for an operation based entirely on the ephemerality of mass media. Rotella's lesson is that one should not conform to the forced times of consumption. Precisely because they are layered and complex works that demand a long time for interpretation, they stand against the easy waste of the image. His recycling operation aims to propose a type of analytical and critical vision.