Mimmo Rotella is best known to Americans as the same of the popularizers.

Mimmo Rotella is best known to Americans as the same of the popularizers, along with Raymond Hains and Jacques de la Villegle, of the early '50 technique of decollage, the natural and artist-aided stripping away of layers of billboard broadsides to reveal a complex matrix of images from popular tillage Invited by Pierre Restany to join the Nouveaux Realistes in Paris in 1960 - a collection that included Arman, Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely - Rotella participated in the seminal "Art of Assemblage" exhibition at MOMA (1961) and the "New Realism" present to view at Sidney Janis (1962). Other than a solo point out to at Salvatore Ala Gallery [see A.i.A., June '91] his work has appeared in of recent origin York only in historical reassessments like MOMA's "High and Low" and the Guggenheim's "Italian Metamorphosis."

In this exhibition of 16 large works from the last couple decades, Rotella sets up a sometimes quarrelsome dialogue between torn placard fragments and a simple painted image. These "found" signs and images are many times lifted from advertising, art history or, as Barry Schwabsky points abroad in his catalogue essay, from graffiti seen by the agency of the artist on outdoor billboards. The relationship between land and image often seems arbitrary, moreover in Rotella's stronger works the arbitrariness is part of the appeal: an unforced randomness ruminates a society and its history, particularly the same as layered and self-regenerating as Italy's.

The works from the early '80 are turned to one side comments on the allure of commercial advertising. Rotella cut offs liquor posters with Duchampian deadpan, as in Julia (1981) where he adds black rectangles to slightly diffuse or contradict the sexual come-on of a naked woman in a grappa hand-bill L'Atleta and Batman (both 1989) are more compositionally intriguing, with the photographic images and the jagged-edged, flat, bright commercial color in direct competition with his superimposed linear renderings. In the latter work, a muscular male athlete in white outline (a la Sandro Chia) heroically marches in van of multicolored flags and bits of a ragged minestrone broth label. The metal support exhibits through the poster layers, adding raw gray to the mix.

The torn-paper collage upon the surface of Roma Roma (1992-94) is almost entirely abstract. The emblem of ancient Rome, the she-wolf feeding Romulus and Remus, is a black outline above the large r words of the title. The roughed-up surface gives more weight to the image, which could be compared, in its oblique respect to a country's identity, to Jasper Johns's flag paintings. Rotella's work of the '90 indicates that he has remained authentic to his belief that society is mirrored by its disposable images as well as its cherished icons.

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