MIMMO ROTELLA | Décollage

Galleria De Crescenzo & Viesti, Rome
Private Collection, Italy (acquired from the above in the late 1990s)
Sotheby's, London, 15 October 2010, Lot 21
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the background is lighter and brighter and the collaged elements are more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. There are artist's pinholes in places. The cardboard elements are irregularly cut and all collaged elements are stable. All surface irregularities, tears and incisions are in keeping with the artist's working process.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Executed with archetypically bold energy, Décollage is a wild and subversive instance of Mimmo Rotella’s pioneering form of appropriation art of the same name. At once enraged by post-war mass culture’s stupefying mechanisms and intoxicated by its imagery, Rotella violently lacerates found posters to create jagged remnants of the streets of 1950s Rome. These fragments are then pasted onto canvas with vinavil glue, creating a surface that oscillates between Cubist abstraction and entropic figuration in which faces and limbs jostle for space. Part of the critical succession of works leading to the foundation of Nouveau Réalisme in 1960 by the critic Pierre Restany, Décollage exemplifies both semantic-values of its equivocal French title: the dismantling of a composite object, and the propulsion of something into the air; an act that unifies de- and constructive processes. Whereas Andy Warhol celebrated the image of mass culture in reliquary fetishisation, Rotella attacked and destabilised it, conceiving of his work fundamentally as protest. He saw Abstract Expressionism as a dead movement: its artists surviving by reproducing – in a hypocritically controlled, rational and financially-conscious way – works that presented as the products of chaos and irrationality. In response, the technique of décollage and the movement of Nouveau Réalisme constituted a return to reality in their recognition of the power of the image and its communicatory media.

From its creation in the late 19th century, the poster both directed and created desires. If we agree with psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan that the object of desire is the object we are anxious to lose or never to get, and hence that anxiety and desire are mutually-entailing, it follows that the poster both directs and creates anxieties. While boasting an interaction of shape and colour that could match any Abstract Expressionist canvas in a solely formal analysis, Décollage is also eloquently mimetic of the tense and passionate relationship between the poster and its viewer. This imitation runs deep. Just as no two different consumers, or one and the same consumer at different times, ever view the same image in the same way, the striations and shapes of Décollage are sufficiently complex that we never interpret its surface the same way more than once.



This work is registered in the Fondazione Mimmo Rotella, Milan