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Décollage on canvas 65.5 x 63 cm, framed. Signed 'Rotella' lower right. The reverse signed 'Rotella'. - Traces of studio. Provenance: Directly from the artist; Siegfried and Martha Adler Collection, Switzerland Exhibitions: Cologne 1962 (Galerie Aenne Abels), Raymond Hains und Mimmo Rotella, Décollagen Galleria La Tartaruga, Rom (stamp verso) The present work is registered in the Fondazione Mimmo Rotella, Milan, under the number 1585 DC 957ca./000. "But what is the linguistic logic behind the décollage? First and foremost, the choice of removing a ,thing', part of a wad of posters that is taken out of the urban context and placed on an artistic ,support': cardboard. The aim is not only to reduce the dialectic between subject and object to the minimum by extinguishing the gesture and action that characterized American Action Painting and European Informel, in order to consign art to its ,objectiveness' in which it is its own sign; but also, apart from the simple action of detaching the posters from the wall, to avoid an intervention characterized by the emotive and physical relationship established by the artist when he participates with his body to create a hand-made product. The linguistic logic also consists in the rejection of the classical formulation of painting where it employs colours from a tube, and in the attempt to find a chromatic formulation that falls within the ,already formulated'. In fact, it acknowledges that the irrational extolled by Pollock, Franz Kline, and Lucio Fontana, is essentially a process that comes about in relation to rationality. The mind is rational and therefore cannot know the irrational, cannot ,represent' it. It was Rotella's intention to substitute the spectacularization of the irrational and the chaotic, as is the case with Pollock (and the documents, photographs and films that show him ,recording' a random and irrational action), with revelation and framing, which he does by removing the material from its urban context. And since he wished to widen freedom of choice, so as to reduce his intervention to a minimum he sought to essentialize the Duchampian ready-made by eschewing the modification of the object itself by upending it or hanging it up, and opting for the simple fragment torn from the wall. Clearly, the operation - though reductive - can never be wholly impersonal and inexpressive; hence the chain of choices and actions creates another sequence of meanings within the sphere of visual and artistic contributions." (Germano Celant, Mimmo Rotella, Milan 2007, p.24).