In 1953, after a trip to the United States, the Italian painter Mimmo Rotella (1918–2006) began ripping down advertising posters from buildings and billboards in Rome and reassembling the tatters on wooden or canvas supports. The resulting compositions, as this small exhibition of his early work shows, feature torn edges and rough, layered surfaces, and they appear visually similar to contemporaneous styles of the time like Abstract Expressionism.
In some works, Rotella pasted the ads, often with chunks of plaster still attached, face down, evoking the yellowed walls from which they came. One small work of a red block sitting above a purple one seems to be an explicit nod to Mark Rothko. Yet the bits of commercial pictures and text—sometimes entire words or brand names—showing through point toward the Pop Art that would burst upon the scene only a few years later. In Scotch Brand (1958–59), white serrations of torn paper separate the top half of a liqueur bottle crowned by a red star from the tartan pattern of a Scotch tape package, complete with a grinning Scottish mascot.
When Andy Warhol appropriated an ad or an image of a mass-produced consumer good, the result could read as both a celebration and an indictment of industrial capitalism. But the material flotsam and jetsam of modernity in Rotella’s work arrives in disconnected splinters, like bubbles surfacing on a pond or images drifting through dreams, producing a far more lyrical and romantic response to the world at midcentury.