20 January 2018
MAON, Museum of 19th and 20th century art in Rende (CS)
April 21, 2018, 6:30 PM
On the Centenary of the Birth.
1918-2018 - ROTELLA VS DADA
FROM DUCHAMP AND MAN RAY TO NEW DADAISM
edited by Tonino Sicoli
On the Centenary of the Birth of Mimmo Rotella (1918-2018), one of the greatest Italian artists of the twentieth century, considered with his décollages an innovator of the languages of contemporary art, at the MAON, Museum of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Art in Rende (Cs) the exhibition “ROTELLA VS DADA - From Duchamp and Man Ray to New Dadaism” opens on January 20, 2018 at 6:00 pm, curated by Tonino Sicoli, which presents an important nucleus of little-known works by the master, compared with a selection of works by Dadaist authors, demonstrating the links with one of the most revolutionary cultural trends of the historical avant-gardes.
The event, which is the eighth edition of the Annual Exhibitions of the Capizzano Center - MAON, is part of the PAC 2014-2020 projects of the Calabria Region.
The figure of Mimmo Rotella (Catanzaro, 1918 – Milan, 2006) is mainly linked to Pop Art, to which the advertising images are referred, especially those of Marilyn Monroe, which together with the portraits made by Andy Warhol, have become icons of our time.
But his story and his research path actually began long before American Pop Art, at least ten years earlier. Rotella's first décollages, "stolen" from the walls of Rome, are in fact from 1953-54, after his trip to Kansas City (1952) and after having abandoned a period of geometricism. Rotella practiced research based on ready-mades, that is, objects taken from reality and transformed into works of art with the attribution of a new sense given by the context of art and new meanings conveyed by new visual languages.
Rotella's operation is conceptually closer to the provocation of the Dadaists of the 1910s and 1920s than to the recovery of the consumerist and advertising object of the pop artists, even if the formal analogies have put it in tune with the contemporary aesthetics of advertising photography, propaganda and the image of an increasingly widespread mass culture. The collection of objects or pieces of images carried out by Rotella in the mid-1950s is, in many ways, closer to the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp and the Dada artists with their primitive and “childish” manner (hence the term “dada”, a sort of nonsense babbling of children’s pre-verbal expression) than to the development of new media languages, more typical of a technological world based on hypercommunication.
Mimmo Rotella is the interpreter of this human and intellectual condition with Dadaist roots, so much so that his first connections in the world of art were with the Nouveau Rèalisme, founded by the French critic Pierre Restany, who in 1960 brought together artists such as Klein, César, Spoerri, Arman and Christo and in 1961 organized the historic exhibition in Paris, with the significant title “À 40° au-dessau de Dada”.
In 1964 Rotella met Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. Apart from the décollages, Rotella and the new Dadaists - as they were called by Restany in those years - created assemblage works, with objects from second-hand dealers, bottle caps, ropes, plates, glasses, bottles, packaging residues, mechanical parts, everyday materials, crumpled sheet metal, packaging, plastic materials, etc. Rotella, in particular, created objets, small monuments to himself, using objects that bear his name (the surveyor's wheel, the Rotella shell, the licorice wheel...) arranging them on bases and signing only sending them, reappropriating their identity value based on the change of meaning and factual context. The apologia of aesthetic nihilism makes the concept and the action the protagonists of the new currents: from Actionism to minimalist and poverty-stricken Conceptualism, from Fluxus to Nouveau Réalisme. Rotella lives this epochal passage, of questioning everything, of rejecting the conventionalism and stereotypes of an increasingly mass and less intellectual culture.
His approach to a complex and contradictory present makes him a dialectical, transversal and controversial character. Even expressive genres are mixed in a superlanguage, in a verbal-visual-sound performance made of alliterations, gestures, mimicry, sounds and rhythms, which make art a border area, in a semiological babel but rich in evocations, suggestions, verbal confusions, interactive actions, staging, with visual, literary and musical provocations.
The epistaltic poems invented by Rotella in 1949, written and recited, in the wake of the futurist free word tables, the calligrams of Apollinaire and the Dadaist poems break the traditional patterns of separate arts and of explanatory and narrative writing.
The exhibition, which remains open until March 31, 2018, is organized by the Center "A. Capizzano” of Rende, with the patronage of the Municipality of Rende, the Municipality of Catanzaro, in agreement, among others, with Matera European Capital of Culture 2019, thanks also to the Rotella Institute and the Mimmo Rotella Foundation.
