Mimmo Rotella - A (1959)

Dated 1959, this work belongs to the founding moment of Mimmo Rotella's research, only a few years after the invention of the decollage in 1953 and in the phase in which his practice aligned with Nouveau Realisme. It is not a stylistic exercise: it is a conceptual break in post-war European art.

Here Rotella does not yet celebrate the cinematic imagery that would define his later work; he works instead on a more radical plane, treating the urban surface as material to be excavated. The composition comes from a destructive gesture, made of tears, abrasions and lacerations, that refuses traditional painting and turns subtraction into a creative act. The letter A, emerging fragmented between the layers of paper, is not a finished image but a visual residue, a fragment of communication suspended between presence and erasure.

The work sits at a point of convergence between the Dada inheritance of Kurt Schwitters and the affichistes, the material investigations of Art Informel, and an early critique of the media that anticipates Pop Art. Where American Pop replicated and amplified the image, Rotella destroys it. The period between 1958 and 1962 remains the most sought nucleus of his production: the years in which the decollage was defined and still carried an unfiltered tension.

Mimmo Rotella (Catanzaro, 1918 - Milan, 2006) is among the central figures of the European post-war avant-garde. After studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples and spending the early 1950s between Rome and the United States, he developed the decollage in 1953, and his work entered into dialogue with Yves Klein and Arman within Nouveau Realisme. It is held today by institutions including the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern.