Mimmo Rotella - Divorce Italian Style

Mimmo Rotella's work, "Divorce Italian Style," is a tribute to Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni, the protagonist of the famous film "Divorce Italian Style." Rotella depicts Mastroianni in a fragmented manner, creating an image that appears destroyed and rebuilt. The theme of "divorce" refers not only to the film, but also to the separation between public and private image, highlighting the contradictions of 1960s Italian society.

In contrast to the collage technique, which constructs images by assembling pieces of different materials, Mimmo Rotella dedicates himself to décollage, which does not create, but destroys the work. The tear becomes the tool with which the artist expresses his vision. The décollage technique consists of tearing and removing layers of advertising and movie posters. In this work, the artist detaches various layers of paper to create a visual effect that distorts the image of Mastroianni, giving it a sense of fracture and movement. This method makes the work lively and evolving, with folds and overlaps that add depth and reflect the theme of the rupture of image and society.

An artist with a multifaceted personality and intense visual concepts always aligned with an avant-garde taste, Mimmo Rotella was born in Catanzaro on October 7, 1918. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, he settled in Rome in 1945. The first phase of his career was characterized by experimentation with different pictorial styles, which would lead him to revolutionize the artistic languages ​​of the postwar period. In 1951, Rotella held his first solo exhibition at the Chiurazzi Gallery in Rome, which received widespread acclaim. In 1952, he was invited by Harvard University to perform a phonetic poetry performance in Boston and by the Library of Congress in Washington to record several phonetic poems. Upon returning to Italy, after a period of reflection on the means of painting and the need for new tools, he invented the "décollage" technique, characterized by tearing off advertising posters posted on the streets and pasting the fragments, whether front or back, onto the canvas. His works dedicated to posters of world cinema featuring the faces of Hollywood's greats date back to the 1960s and beyond. In 1961, at the invitation of critic Pierre Restany, Mimmo Rotella joined the Nouveaux Réalistes group, which included Raymond Hains, Jacques Mah de la Villeglè, and François Dufrène, who were already using advertising posters with processes similar to his. He died in Milan on January 8, 2006.

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