Mimmo Rotella; experimental artist (FABULOUS)
Hyfler/Rosner
12 January 2006
Mimmo Rotella, artist: born Catanzaro, Italy 7 October 1918;
died Milan 8 January 2006.
His art:
http://www.farsettiarte.it/img/news/20050907180157.jpg
http://www.artnet.com/artist/628473/Mimmo_Rotella.html
http://www.artmulti.se/rotellapage_1.htm
http://www.cowlesgallery.com/Rotella00.html
Nothing illustrates more vividly the hectic post-war art
scene than the scintillating career of the Italian
experimental artist Mimmo Rotella.
Rotella made his name in the 1950s by ripping posters of
film stars from the walls of Rome by night and then
transforming them into ingenious, provocative and amusing
collages. They were mainly posters of Italian stars, for it
was the period of the great Italian film-maker. So Rotella
tore up works of varying quality, from Europa di notte,
starring the yet unknown Henri Salvador and Carmen Sevilla,
to La dolce vita by Fellini.
Strips and patches of the posters were wrenched from
hoardings and given various kinds of treatment in the
artist's studio before being assembled helter-skelter in
dizzying Surrealist combinations stuck to the canvas. Lots
of torn-up and rearranged starlets enjoyed a
more-than-fleeting celebrity through these wry manipulations
of their faces and figures, carried off with such malicious
effrontery and artistic virtuosity.
Rotella was born into a modest middle-class family in 1918.
His mother "took in sewing" and some of her materials would
make appearances in her son's later works. He had art
training in Naples, but his first job was in a minor post at
the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications in Rome. He did
military service in the Second World War, being demobbed in
1944.
For a while Rotella made a living by teaching art in his
home town, Catanzaro in Calabria. But he soon returned to
Rome, where he first made a name for himself as the inventor
of "phonetic poetry", a forerunner of the concrete poetry of
the Fifties and Sixties. He wanted to become a painter,
however, and for a time hesitated between figurative and
geometric styles to match his experimental poetry.
His first exhibition of abstract and geometric paintings in
1951 in Rome proved a total flop. So he sought artistic
success in more broad-minded America, where he enjoyed a
certain popularity through his experimental abstract poetry.
It was the era of concrete poetry, wonderfully elaborated in
the early works of the great Scot Edwin Morgan, who penned
such artless ditties as
Pool
Peopl
e plop!
Cool.
(Fortunately, Morgan developed into a major British poet.)
Rotella wowed them at the University of Kansas City with his
"percussive" poems. At Harvard he gave standing-room-only
performances of his "phonetic" works. The Americans adored
his quaint English and his warm Italian rapport with the
newly liberated youth of the United States. Full of his
American success story, he returned to Rome for his second
exhibition in 1952 - this received another lukewarm
reception that led to a long fallow period.
But artistic release finally arrived, although it took an
unusual form. Rotella started stripping the walls of Rome of
their cinema posters, in a technique that became known as
"laceration". With a number of French artists in the "New
Realist" movement initiated by the art critic Pierre Restany
in Paris in 1949, Rotella began to be known in Italy, for he
was the only Italian member of the group. Restany later
coined the term "rotelliser" - to "rotellise" - to describe
Rotella's working process.
There was method in apparent madness: he transformed his
ribbons and rags of film posters into inscrutable jigsaw
puzzles whose solution lay simply in the eye's enjoyment of
their Cubist collage. His art became mania, though not
manic. The next step was to "deconstruct" the torn-down
posters even further by tearing the loose strips into
crumpled rags and tatters and further distressing them in
the studio - "double décollage". Then the bits and pieces
were stuck haphazardly on a prepared canvas. The final
effect was often rivetingly shocking and oddly touching in
its injured beauty. He also experimented with a
"recto-verso" technique in which he obtained recklessly
vivid chromatic contrasts by exposing the reverse sides of
certain fragments.
These experiments made of Rotella a living legend in a world
of Italian art - fanatical, extravagant, unpredictable. He
became like some possessed creature in an early silent movie
roaming the streets and alleys of Rome and tearing at the
walls. He was linked with other groundbreaking experimenters
like Yves Klein, Arman, Jean Tinguely and César.
During the Sixties, Rotella started making "assemblages" -
breath-taking amalgamations of the most various and
heteroclite compositions, like his "Tapezzeria Romana"
("Roman Tapestry") which, in homage to his seamstress
mother, he trimmed with passementerie. They were exhibited
at Galerie J in Paris as well as at Cinecittà. In the late
Sixties, there was another Galerie J exhibition of his new
discovery, MecArt (from "mechanical art", also known as
"mechanical painting"), created by the use of manipulated
photography.
Mimmo Rotella's autobiography, Autorotella, was published in
1972. In 1980, he returned to acrylic painting and had
exhibitions devoted to various subjects like his
"marouflages" (with cloth or tape backings) - another
tribute to his seamstress mother - and a series of "Blanks",
posters covered by sheets of white paper.
James Kirkup
marilyn...@aol.com
became like some possessed creature in an early silent movie
roaming the streets and alleys of Rome and tearing at the
walls"
wow -- what a line to find in an obit -- thanks Amelia
I saved his piece "Virtual" from your last link to my desktop...
M
Hyfler/Rosner
<marilyn...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1137034656.5...@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
I think I liked the obit more than the art, but I love the
idea of him defacing advertising all these years.
Wonder why.
Hoodoo
wrote:
>Mimmo Rotella, artist: born Catanzaro, Italy 7 October 1918;
>died Milan 8 January 2006.
>
>His art:
>http://www.farsettiarte.it/img/news/20050907180157.jpg
>http://www.artnet.com/artist/628473/Mimmo_Rotella.html
>http://www.artmulti.se/rotellapage_1.htm
>http://www.mimmorotella.it/
>http://www.cowlesgallery.com/Rotella00.html
Thanks for the links! Interesting work. He sure enjoyed
using Marilyn Monroe for a subject.