Mimmo Rotella

It is 1955 when, in the January issue of the magazine Civiltà delle Macchine, a reproduction of a décollage signed by Mimmo Rotella appears. This is the first publication of a work made with this technique, which consists in the tearing and subsequent reworking of advertising posters superimposed on each other as a result of the different billboards. The artist's action leads to the emergence of fragmentary figures and words from their layers, mutually discordant; his aim is to allude to the pervasiveness of images in the nascent mass culture, as well as to their ephemeral nature. The consumer society needs to produce and 'devour' in a continuous cycle not only images, but also symbols, mythologies, objects: around this reflection Pierre Restany brought together artists from different backgrounds in 1960, including Rotella, in the group called Nouveau Réalisme. The works of these authors arise from the appropriation of material elements representative of current events, which become the basis of their expressive operations. It is the décollage that gives Rotella international fame, who will also devote himself at the same time to the sculptural assembly of objects or parts of them. The works created through photographic transfer - which have as their object portraits of people or pages of newspapers - and the so-called artypo - typographic sheets that present an apparently random overlapping of images - will later make him one of the reference figures of Mec-Art. Five kidnapped beings, linked to a narrative dimension often evoked by Rotella: that of cinema, stands out among the works of the Ekilibrio Foundation, all belonging to the two-year period 1962/63.