Gianni Bertini, Bruno Di Bello, Elio Mariani, Mimmo Rotella, Aldo Tagliaferro
curated by Francesco Tedeschi

Event in collaboration with Galleria Elleni, Marconi Foundation, Mudima Foundation, Mimmo Rotella Foundation, Aldo Tagliaferro Archive, VAF Foundation.

The exhibition, dedicated to the Mec Art, intends to propose, with a spectacular and exhaustive set-up, the characteristics of the trend that was born in the first half of the 1960s in Paris, and developed thanks to some manifestations in Italy between 1966 and 1970. Founded on the creation of works on canvas emulsified with photographic procedures, the Mec Art was expressed through works in which the techniques of photography, painting and collage ideally overlapped, giving rise to works that interpreted the subjects of contemporaneity - of a chronicle that soon became the image of an era and the form of history - according to the values traceable in the individual poetics of the authors who participated in the exhibitions and initiatives linked to the history of Mec Art.

Originally promoted by the critical stance of Pierre Restany, who intended it to be a European response to the forms and modes of Pop Art, Mec Art made it possible to reconnect the history of photographic experimentation of the historical avantgardes with the themes and “myths” of the present. Among its protagonists from the very beginning are Mimmo Rotella and Gianni Bertini, who had already been directly followed by Restany in the exhibitions in Paris and other international cities that he held in the early 1960s. Its presentation in Italy, at the Galleria Blu in Milan in 1966, was followed by the involvement of a number of artists of a younger generation, among whom those who most assiduously participated in the subsequent initiatives, curated by Italian critics such as Pierluigi Albertoni and Daniela Palazzoli, were Aldo Tagliaferro, Bruno Di Bello and Elio Mariani. The works of these five artists are at the centre of the discussion on Mec Art developed by Volker Feierabend, Francesco Tedeschi and Kevin McManus for the volume recently published by Silvana Editoriale, on the initiative of the VAF Foundation, which aimed to make an in-depth study of the characteristics of Mec Art and its historical-critical development. The same authors are the protagonists of the exhibition that Frittelli arte contemporanea is offering to the public from 4 June to 24 July, with more than 40 works selected among the most significant ones they created between the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s.

Starting with some of Rotella's work around the assassination of John Kennedy and the events of the Second Vatican Council, resumed in his exhibition Vatican IV held in 1965 at the Galerie J in Paris, and from the first evidence of mechanomorphic subject art derived from Gianni Bertini's photographic techniques, the exhibition unravels around the themes and techniques proposed by the individual authors, with a focus on the relationship with the chronicle, the “myths” of their time, the memory of the avantgarde, the representation of contemporary man in the light of the proposals of the cultural industry and the media, to arrive at the analytical reflections that introduce a further elaboration in a “conceptual” sense of Mec Art at the end of the decade.

In addition to presenting the various subjects on which Mec Art has practised, the focus on individual authors is also expressed through the presentation of some large-format works, which are a sign of a desire for representation oriented towards measuring itself against the spectacularity of the new media.