‘So in the evenings I began to tear the posters, ripping them from the walls, and take them back to my studio, creating compositions and leaving them exactly the way they were, exactly the way I saw them. That is how the décollage came to be’ (M. Rotella, quoted in A. Fiz, ‘Décollage, A Metaphor for the World’, in Mimmo Rotella: China Exhibition, exh. cat., Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing 2003, p.9)

Estroverso (Outgoing) (1958) and Marilyn Salta di Nascosto (Marylin Secretly Jumps) (2004) are two significant examples of Mimmo Rotella's signature décollages, comprising layered fragments of torn advertising posters. Rotella first began to explore décollage in 1953 when he returned to Rome after spending two years in America. Initially conceived as a form of protest against what he thought to be a rigid, static society, the artist began to tear down the peeling posters that occupied the streets of Rome, building on the tradition of the Affichistes, who operated in Paris during the 1940s and 1950s and introduced a new artistic format: the tearing down of posters. Estroverso is composed of brightly coloured pieces of torn street posters glued onto canvas, which lend the work a powerful urban appearance. Within the multiple layers of text and imagery, fragments of Italian words, suggestive of newspapers, locations and personal names are noticeable. Marilyn Salta di Nascosto, created nearly half a century later, has a more sensual and elegant aesthetic, recalling the posters of Rotella’s first Cinecittà series that featured iconic film stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant and John Wayne. Both works are created with superimposed and torn posters: instead of colours and paintbrush, Rotella uses paper and a spatula which he uses to scrape and scratch layers of paper. In his décollages he works by subtraction, uncovering strips of weathered posters in order to reveal different strata of imagery. The present works erase the boundaries between high and low art, myth and reality, and provide a vivid commentary of the fragility of public memory, culture of consumption and mass communication in the post-War environment. Rotella’s practice has been highly influential the works of contemporary artists, who deal with the urban experience such as Mark Bradford and Klara Lidén.