Frittelli arte contemporanea opens Saturday 10 December 2016 Urban Papers. Rotella, Masi, Francolino. 

The exhibition gathers the artworks of the three artists created in different decades and with three different operative typologies. Paper materials are among the founding elements of their language. Tone and texture of the papers, being made in free (unlimited) time, or in their reworking in the studio, construction of surfaces altered by “wounds” of various origins create harmonies that transcend the peculiar artistic backgrounds of the three authors.

The retro d'affiches by Mimmo Rotella (Catanzaro, 1918 - Milan, 2006) in the exhibition, executed between 1954 and 1960, analyze the forms and materials that develops on the back of advertising posters - glues, rusts, aggregations and heterogeneous residues - through the tearing action. Tearing becomes an instrument of reappropriation and reification of urban reality. The artist then “re-pastes” the posters using their verso, with the precise intention of making the original image disappear in order to dwell on the unveiled back matter.

Paolo Masi (Florence, 1933) created Cartoni [Cardboards] between 1973 and 1977: packaging cardboard, crumbly and industrial object, abandoned urban residue, becomes the space on which the artist intervenes with incisions, holes, colored pencils, graphite, adhesives, tissue paper and kraft paper tape, until the internal structure of the support is brought to light and made perceptible. Each element is then organized in serial compositions, through combinations that highlight the “individuality in the constant” and bringing out similarities and differences between the various polymateric surfaces.

The Percorsi [Paths] by Andrea Francolino (Bari, 1979), sequences or groups of casts of cracks made by concrete powder imprinted on paper, made starting from 2015, represent temporary spaces in time or physical routes, conceptual metaphors of existence. Each work shows date, time and satellite coordinates that precisely identify the space-time of its action. The crack in the urban surface is irrefutable proof of the becoming of things, a symbol of human fragility and its culture, while concrete, an emblematic material of contemporaneity, generally associated with the ideas of durability and solidity, at the same time denotes its own criticality.

Three artists of different generations who, starting from everyday urban fragments, reflect on the relationship between material culture and the human being in the contemporary context.