Mimmo Rotella

MIMMO ROTELLA Catanzaro, 1918 – Milan, 2006

Mimmo Rotella was born in Catanzaro on October 7, 1918. After completing middle school, he moved to Naples to pursue his artistic studies. However, in 1941, he obtained a job at the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and returned to Rome. His stay in the capital was brief as he was called to serve in the military and enrolled in the officers' training course at the Nocera School, from where he was sent to the Non-commissioned Officers' School in Caserta. In 1944, after being discharged, he obtained his diploma from the Artistic High School in Naples. From 1944 to 1945, he taught Drawing at the Technical Institute for Surveyors in his hometown. In 1945, he was back in Rome, and after his initial figurative works and early experiments, he developed a painterly style influenced by Neo-Geometricism. His participation in exhibitions began in 1947 at the Figurative Arts Trade Show and continued at the annual Art Club exhibitions until 1951, both in Rome and Turin. In 1949, as an alternative expressive method, he invented phonetic poetry. In the same year, he wrote the manifesto for phonetic poetry, which was published by Leonardo Sinisgalli in "Civiltà delle macchine" in 1955. His first solo exhibition, featuring abstract-geometric works, took place in 1951 in Rome. In 1951, he had his first contact with French artists when he exhibited at the "Salon des Realistés Nouvelles" in Paris. Between 1951 and 1952, he was awarded a scholarship by the Fullbright Foundation, which allowed him to travel to the United States as an "Artist in Residence" at the University of Kansas City. There, he created a large mural composition and produced phonetic poems with percussion instruments. He performed phonetic poetry at Harvard University in Boston and recorded other performances for the Library of Congress in Washington. In 1952, he held his second solo exhibition at the Rockhill Nelson Gallery in Kansas City. During his time in the United States, he had the opportunity to meet representatives of new artistic movements such as Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Twombly, and Pollock. Upon his return to Rome in 1953, Rotella went through a long period of crisis, during which he ceased his painting production. Convinced that everything in art had already been done, he suddenly had what he referred to as a "Zen enlightenment" and discovered advertising posters as an artistic expression and a message of the city. Thus, décollage was born (initially called collage), where he glued torn pieces of posters found on the streets onto canvas, adopting the collage technique of the Cubists and merging it with the Dadaist concept of the objet trouvé. In 1955, during an exhibition in Rome titled "Contemporary Art Exhibition," he exhibited the first "torn poster manifesto." He practiced the so-called "double décollage," where he first detached the poster from the wall and then tore it in the studio. During those years, he also used the backs of posters, employing them from the reverse side, resulting in non-figurative and monochromatic works. He received recognition in 1956 with the Graziano Prize and in 1957 with the Battistoni Prize and the Public Education Prize. With his "Cinecittà" series in 1958, he selected figures and faces from cinema posters, shifting his production towards more figurative works. By the end of the 1950s, Rotella, already identified by critics as part of the "Young Roman Painting" movement, was labeled as the "poster ripper" or the "painter of pasted paper." Armed with a razor blade at night, he not only tore posters but also collected pieces of sheet metal and zinc from the frames used for posting advertisements in the streets of Rome. In 1958, the French critic Pierre Restany visited him in Rome, marking the beginning of a long collaboration. That same year, he participated in the exhibition "New Trends in Italian Art" organized by Lionello Venturi at the Rome-New York Art Foundation. The public's curiosity about the artist's eccentricities and his decidedly bohemian lifestyle was manifested in 1960 through a short film dedicated to the "Angry Painters," directed by Enzo Nasso, with Rotella providing the sound commentary. In 1960, he joined Nouveau Réalisme (although he did not sign the manifesto), a movement theorized by Pierre Restany, which also included artists such as Klein, Tinguely, Spoerri, and Christo. American Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, along with the Informal movement and the spatial and material explorations carried out by Fontana and Burri in Italy during those years, played a significant role in Rotella's artistic direction. In 1960, he met De Kooning and Rothko in Rome. In 1964, he was invited to the Venice Biennale. As the press became increasingly interested in the Affichisme phenomenon, he moved to Paris, where he started developing a serial production process by projecting negative images onto emulsified canvas. This operation was defined by the artist as "Reportage" or, more specifically, "Mec-Art." Between 1967 and 1973, using typographic products, he created "Art-typo" by selecting and freely reproducing chosen printing proofs on canvas. With this technique, he enjoyed overlapping and superimposing advertising images: "I have reversed my old way of proceeding: first, I tried to disintegrate, now I seek to reintegrate that material, that reality." In the early 1970s, he created works by intervening on magazine advertisements using solvents, reducing them either to imprints (frottage) or simply erasing them (effaçage). In 1972, he published a bold autobiography titled "Autorotella." In 1975, he introduced "Plastiforme": torn posters placed on polyurethane supports to give them a three-dimensional dimension. In the same year, he released the first Italian LP of phonetic poetry, presented by Alfredo Todisco, and in 1976, he participated in the "International Recital of Sound Poetry - Poetry Action" at the Annick Le Moine Studio. Another experimentation during those years involved crumpling posters and enclosing them in plexiglass cubes. After leaving Paris and settling in Milan in 1980, Rotella developed "blanks" or poster coverings: zeroed-out advertising posters covered with white sheets, as is the case with expired advertisements, as a conceptual operation. In 1984, he returned to brushes and acrylic colors to create the second cycle of works dedicated to cinema: Cinecittà 2. In 1986, he went to Cuba to exhibit his work at the University of Havana, where he also performed a torn poster performance in the city square. He then created "overpaintings," drawing inspiration from the contemporary theme of graffiti, by painting on torn and pasted advertising posters on canvas. In 1990, he participated in the "Art et Pub" exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and in "High and Low" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1991, he married the young Russian economist Inna Agarounova, who gave birth to their daughter Asya in 1993. In 1992, he was awarded the title of Officiel des arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang. He was invited to the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1994 for the exhibition "Italian Metamorphosis," and again to the Centre Pompidou in 1996 for "Face à l'Histoire." In 1996, his work was featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in the exhibition "Halls of Mirrors," which subsequently traveled the world, including Rome. In 1997, he dedicated a cycle of works titled "Felliniana" to Federico Fellini's cinema. He passed away in Milan on January 8, 2006.