On Friday 8th July 2016 the Vistamare gallery inaugurates a two-man show featuring the work of Mimmo Rotella and Anna Franceschini. Once again the gallery flanks the work of a major international artist who has enjoyed decades of critical and public acclaim with that of a young artist from a very different artistic background, in an exhibition that juxtaposes their work in each of the gallery’s rooms. The homage to Rotella unfolds in over thirty canvases that represent the Calabrian master’s entire career, from the early décollages of the 1950s and 1960s to his final works produced in the early 2000s, occasionally revealing a change of mood in the techniques and expressive languages employed, but unchanging in their stylistic intent and continual experimentation. One of the best-known video artists on the contemporary scene, Anna Francheschini presents five films in which, once again, she uses the medium of film to explore ideas of sense and meaning. Despite their differences and the distance that separates them, it is the world of cinema, with its flavor and mystery as a constant point of reference, that links both artists; both strive to capture its multitude of allusions, pouring onto canvas and film images that are alternately abstract and figurative.
Mimmo Rotella (Catanzaro 1918 – Milan 2006) It was in the early 1950s when, in the midst of a crisis regarding traditional painting and deluded by his experience up to that point, Rotella had what he himself called a “zen illumination” and invented the décollage. Enchanted by the posters that he saw affixed to the buildings of Piazza del Popolo in Rome, he decided to appropriate them for himself. By night he pulled them off the walls and then re-elaborated them in his studio, gluing the printed paper onto canvas in overlapping layers, in an act of deliberate cross-contamination of “sacred” and profane, fusing styles, avant-garde references and more. The operation reveals echoes of Dadaism, the Duchampian idea of the ready-made, and also an affinity with Pop Art and American action painting as well as the Informal art being produced in Italy by Burri and Fontana. A multiplicity of different experiences contribute to Rotella’s “revelation” which, having begun as a gestural operation, soon becomes conceptual. The juxtapositions of scraps of torn paper, making equal use of the printed side or the back of the posters, are never casual but serve a compositional purpose, contributing to a harmony formed of finely-judged relationships between materials and colours. The works on show present an approximately chronological overview of the various stages of a long and varied career, from the early abstract and almost monochrome compositions of the 1950s, often on small canvases, to the works from the Cinecittà series in which Rotella re-appropriates clearly legible and well-known images, his work itself contributing to their mythical status. His Marilyns, which appear at every stage of his artistic career, have become almost as iconic as Marilyn Monroe herself. In the 1970s his work becomes increasingly experimental with the Artypos – printers’ proofs that are selected and then liberally affixed to canvas in a “pop” approach very similar to that of Warhol and seen in Frutti Siciliani (1966) and The Brandy of Napoleon (1972). With the 1980s come the “Sovrapitture”, overlayed paintings on canvas or sheet metal inspired by graffiti and including some notable self-portraits: here Rotella intervenes with paint strokes on top of torn posters that have been glued to the canvas. He adds anonymous phrases like those that can be read on city walls: declarations of love or political graffiti. In the same period he also resumes work on the series connected with the world of cinema, work that will continue up until his death, transforming commercial subjects into works of contemporary art. As Rotella himself declared, “ripping posters from the walls is the only compensation, the only way of protesting against a society that has lost its taste for change and for magical transformations”. These works are samples torn from urban reality, fragments with which Rotella rips apart traditional painting, inventing a method of destroying and wounding the image that in reality exalts it and renders it unique, saving it from a soul-destroying uniformity.
Mimmo Rotella’s work is to be found in major public collections and museums worldwide including: the Chelsea Art Museum and Miotte Foundation, New York; Les Abattoirs, Toulouse; Civico Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan; GNAM – Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; MACI — Museo Arte Contemporanea, Isernia; MACRO — Museo d´Arte Contemporanea Rome; MART — Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Trent; The Menil Collection, Houston; MUMOK — Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris; MUSEION – Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano; Museo d´Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genoa; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna – Collecçao Berardo, Sintra; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart; The Tate, London; Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv.
Anna Franceschini is an Italian artist known for her very personal and privileged use of film and video, a use that derives from her experience as a student of cinematography, immediately after which she began to employ film to allusive and not merely narrative ends – a choice that led her straight into the world of contemporary art rather than that of cinema. In her videos Franceschini observes reality and the objects of which it is composed with a notably cool gaze, deliberately avoiding the easy satisfaction of subjective interpretations and therefore creating a sense of detachment well-suited to the game she plays, which is that of showing us the world as a “huge storehouse in which hidden treasures lurk”. Her research tends towards pure cinema, towards the use of a visual language that recalls early and experimental cinema; free of narrative constraints, hers is a symbolic and evocative art the protagonists of which are inanimate objects. Her films oscillate continually between the figurative and the abstract; they move horizontally and vertically in a form of cinema that is focused on the poetry of the moving image and the creation of an optical illusion of depth. The works on show include the video The Diva Who Became an Alphabet (2014) which in the seductive choreography of a moving canvas, clearly reveals the principle of objectivisation that the artist employs and thanks to which the story of a woman who becomes a letter of the alphabet suggests the idea of a human presence through its very absence. In her 2010 video Nothing is More Mysterious. A Fact that is Well Explained, the idea emerges of a private dimension in which the objects being filmed (always on 16mm film, the images being transferred to DVD at a later stage) reflect the inner life of things and of their surroundings – an observation conditioned by the human condition. So the palm, emblem of the Caribbean and protagonist of the video, seems, as it moves in an unpredictable dance (like that of a child’s mobile or a musical-box ballerina), to be transformed into something different, mysterious and occasionally disturbing.
In 2011 Anna Franceschini was awarded a special mention in the Ariane de Rothschild prize (Milan) and in 2012 she was the winner of the Premio Fondazione Casoli (Fabriano, Italy), of the MacroAmici Prize, Roma Contemporary 5, the Premio Terna and the Premio New York, awarded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Artist residency programmes in which she has participated include the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten – Amsterdam, VIR/ViafariniInResidence – Milan, the ISCP in New York, MACRO Museum, Rome, Instituto Inclusartiz, Rio De Janeiro, and the PIVÔ Research Program, São Paulo, Brazil.
Her work is present in important private collections and museums including the Museé National d’art Moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Museo MACRO – Rome, the Dommering Collection, Amsterdam, the Nicoletta Fiorucci Collection – London, the FRAC MIDI-PYRÉNÉES and Les Abbatoirs, Toulouse, France.
The Vistamare gallery thanks the Fondazione Marconi and the Archivio Mimmo Rotella, Milan.