What is the relevance today of Mimmo Rotella’s décollages (Catanzaro, 1918 – Milan, 2006), the torn and manipulated posters? From being a symbol of mass communication in the last century, in the artistic transformation they had become manipulable after having been manipulative, but now communication – especially that which wants to convince us at all costs – comes much less through paper, has been “adopted” by social media and is increasingly manipulative.
Today, how can we tear it away? A clear answer comes from the exhibition that the Cannaviello Art Studio dedicated to the Calabrian artist, which, in its 57th year of activity, has reopened in the new headquarters in via Pagliano in Milan. It is true that, especially in the décollages taken from large cinema posters with actors who were popular at the time, the message could appear as an evocation of the past or, at most, as an example of high historicization.
Instead this is the plus point: Rotella’s creative and disruptive art is first and foremost history and remains art. Not only does it tell and preserve, but in its intact originality it continues to teach and encourage, that is, it proposes an example of art that invents and fights, that “destroys” what presents itself as true but is instead artificial, that recreates from the “rubble” of what it would have liked to convince us at low cost (of ideas and materials).
Therefore continuing to indicate a sovereign function of art, Rotella – one of the few Italians to have been able to boast international recognition – is more current and exemplary than ever. All this without forgetting the quality of the composition of each work, where successions of colors and tears, full and empty, never left to chance, express a strictly artistic tension in itself. In the Milanese exhibition, which brings together over thirty works, there are also examples of “overpaintings”, in which the brush strokes give even more emphasis to the artistic intervention, and a series of “multiple originals”, with the silk-screen technique.