curated by Federico Sardella

Frittelli arte contemporanea presents the exhibition Par Erreur. Mimmo Rotella Artypo, curated by Federico Sardella, which will open on Saturday 15 January and remain open until 19 March 2011.

The exhibition includes about fifty works created by the artist over the course of a decade, between the second half of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, some of them large-sized, all are part of the famous Artypo group; a term that derives from the fusion and juxtaposition of the words “art” and “typographie”, and which Rotella appropriated to name this series of works. All the works were created using those sheets used for the start-up of typographic machines, on which various advertising works are overprinted, giving rise to the random overlapping of colours and images and which the artist, once selected, transfers onto canvas or laminate. 

As Rotella himself writes “...these works are paintings made from proofs, affiches obtained in some printing plants in Paris, Milan and Rome, from which strong, suggestive, mysterious and spectacular images emerge. New images, certainly identifiable but difficult to categorize, which are proposed simultaneously one on top of the other and one within the other, reaching extraordinary levels of visual and communicative effectiveness.” 

Rotella's work develops by invention and already by the mid-1950s he had already made a name for himself thanks to the décollages that were displayed in public and private exhibitions in museums and galleries all over the world. But the need for radical experimentation never ends for the artist, who nevertheless wants to provoke the public's attention by displacing it: every acknowledgement makes Rotella feel the need to turn his research elsewhere, as in the case of the Artypo, which in ten years have become an understood linguistic form that has become part of the art codes, leading the author to freeze this nucleus of a few hundred works in a finished corpus that has never been taken up again. Even when the pressure from the market for new works became obsessive, the artist never wanted to return to this cycle, which he always considered to be the most emotionally intense. And indeed, when he was invited by Harald Szeemann to participate in the Venice Biennial in 2001, he wanted to exhibit some of his works in his personal room.

Each time, Rotella intervenes on the advertising, he physically takes possession of it with an operation that breaks the mould of traditional aesthetic research, with a theft to the detriment of the sense of things: these sheets, which are an instrument of typographic work - in fact, they are used to register the printing presses - are subtracted from their role of industrial production tool and transformed in their entirety, without any subsequent intervention, into an artistic object. This image, casually obtained by superimposing other images, is charged with ambiguity the moment it is shown, without the need for further commentary. So the camera starts become a work of art: the Artypo.

It is up to the artist to select the subjects, through an intellectual choice based on an examination of the existing. What counts is the effect of the image in relation to its ability to interact with the viewer: the forms of advertising communication, which pervade the city on every corner, are the most effective. The message of the street comes alive in art, it operates there through the almost complete transposition of advertising images, it becomes a “metaphor for the world”. 

Through the urban visual vocabulary, heritage of mass culture, Rotella takes the boundary between artistic language and popular culture to an extreme. Appropriation, decontextualization and accumulation are the tools of a communication that wants to catch the public off guard: “Art? It is that thing that wants to catch the beholder off guard. The rest is academia.”

This is a very opportune moment to deepen our knowledge of the artist as an important exhibition dedicated to his large-scale works is being held in Milan at the Palazzo Reale in the same period as the Florentine exhibition.