Frittelli arte contemporanea is pleased to start the exhibition program for the 2019/2020 season with a new exhibition dedicated to Mimmo Rotella, thirteen years after Cinecittà, an exhibition that inaugurated the gallery's current headquarter in the outskirts of Florence in April 2006.

Io piaccio. Mimmo Rotella e il gioco dell'eros [I like. Mimmo Rotella and the Game of Eros] is an opportunity to investigate Rotella's poetics from a specific point of view, that of eroticism. The theme of “liking” as an element for giving and receiving tension, from art and life, is always present in Rotella's work: “Eroticism is very important for a painter's life, a bit like an experience, a bit like a fact, let's say, progressive, like a lymph on which a painter feeds himself, in order to continuously create erotic, or non-erotic works” the artist said in the interview-dialogue published by Carla Lonzi in Autoritratto (1969).

The exhibition brings together more than thirty artworks that trace Rotella's path between the end of the 1960s and the first decade of the 2000s, in the variety of techniques he experimented with and in the different approaches, allusive or shameless, to the “world of eros”. Io Piaccio [I like] (1990) - which gives the exhibition its title - is a “monumental” poster detached from its own support and re-proposed without any intervention, almost a sort of programmatic declaration. Terror, a mec-art created in 1968, proposes the enlargement of erotic service ads published in American newspapers; the artypo Dammela [Give it to me] (1967) short-circuits the slogan for the promotion of a beer with the hands of a pair of lovers. In the frottage and effaçage, the red-light sampler offered by magazines is subjected to the altering action, never completely controllable, of chemical solvents. The polyptych Erotellique de Rotella (1990) recounts the fall of the Wall through the juxtaposition of pornographic images from Western and Eastern Europe, on which the artist reproduces the erotic graffiti that invaded Berlin's public baths. The large metal sheet Un desiderio [A desire] (1992) transports the street inside the places of art, transforming the layers of advertising posters from instruments of commercial propaganda into traces of popular culture, at the same time sensual and provocative. Belonging to the new millennium are the revisitations of the famous Cinecittà cycle (this is how Rotella called the décollages made from film posters), which highlight the strong sensuality that is released from the constructed image of movies stars and the fascination of the Hollywood myth.