On Rotella & Rauschenberg

Back in Italy. After a gig in Florence last week, I took the train up to Genoa to catch a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition, Mimmo Rotella 1945-2005; a retrospective of over 100 works, many of them iconic, at the Palazzo Ducale. 

Rotella is best known for his appropriation of movie posters and use of decollage, ripping and tearing parts of posters, partially revealing imagery from the layers underneath. Because my work is made from the same commercial sources: advertising and other commercial media (most of it Italian), it has sometimes drawn comparison with his. But in my collages, layers are more often the result of accretion than tearing or removal, and though I work improvisationally, I work the surface extensively, ultimately exerting a more painterly, traditional control over the composition. The materials are often so broken down, combined, and manipulated that the source is for all intents, lost, or just a ghost. Rotella presented his ripped posters as if fresh off the walls where they’d been posted, and though seemingly effortless, they are always perfectly balanced compositions.

Mimmo Rotella, 1945-2005, Palazzo Ducale, Genoa, 2026.

Another notable phase in Rotella’s work involved the use of photo transfer, a technique used more extensively by Robert Rauschenberg, another of my favorite artists, who was also featured in the 1964 Venice Biennale that catapulted them and the arrival of Pop Art onto the international stage. 

Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive II, 1963, oil and silkscreen ink on canvas

Rotella remains less well known outside of Italy than Rauschenberg, but they had much in common. Andy Warhol, who was also represented in that Biennale, is of course the most famous purveyor of Pop Art–the silkscreens of Campbell’s soup cans or multiple Marilyn Monroes. Though he was brilliant and certainly a game changer, his work, like his famous public persona, was cooler, more calculated, and distanced. Both Rauschenberg and Rotella, on the other hand, showed irrepressible delight in the materials of their modern urban surroundings, the mass-produced imagery and advertising, the consumer culture that exploded in the postwar period. 

They both came from that creative, rule-breaking flourishing of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, when New York choreographers began incorporating “pedestrian” movements like walking or falling in their work, and composers began including unconventional sounds: tape recordings, electronic instruments, prepared piano, or, in the most famous example, John Cage’s 4:33, the incidental sounds in the auditorium as the performer sits silently at the piano. Many saw that as simply a provocation–a trick, a joke. I see it as a Zen-like embrace of the here and now, a breaking down of artificial barriers between high and low, between the world of art and the world we all experience; looking past the academic in favor of inclusivity. 

Rauschenberg, who collaborated often with Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, embraced the visual equivalent, incorporating anything and everything around him in his work: like Rotella, the collages and photo transfers of iconic, mass-produced images from the news and pop culture; but also sculpture, or a combinationn of both: “Combines,” as he called them, made often from items found on the street in Soho around his studio. 

Robert Rauschenberg, Black Market, 1961. Oil, watercolor, printed paper, printed reproductions, wood, metal, metal box & four notepads on canvas, with rope, rubber stamp, inkpad & various objects.

Much has been said and written about the ways in which Rotella and Rauschenberg’s work was a commentary on and a reaction to the societal changes of the post-war period, but what stands out for me about them, when held up against their peers, is an enduring, boundless playfulness, a pleasure in visual and tactile elements of their modern, urban environments that inspired them to engage with, and through the alchemy of art, encourage others into a new way of seeing.

Rotella sums it up with characteristic candor and wit in this quote from the exhibition:

“The images of advertising and cinema fascinated me. I would think: look how beautiful it is, now I’ll take it and show it. It could be a film star, but also a piece of cheese.”

Mimmo Rotella, Metrica Industrializzata, 1961, artypo on canvas.