La folla

Words – dispersed, unfettered, indecipherable – appear at the centre of the composition, by now half-muttered, unsupported by any logical framework: “…forebears of every…”; “…that be…”. The image consists just of a section wall; plaster that Rotella stole from the street and recomposed in his studio. On a traditional mount he built up layers of torn papers – manifestos, posters – which the bill posters had applied to the plaster and to which time had soon given them their air of objects that had transited rapidly through our lives, and were already past.
Perhaps as early as 1954 Rotella began ripping posters off walls. Certainly he exhibited them in Rome and Milan in 1955. He was therefore ahead of his French colleagues (known as Les Affichistes), who exhibited their compositions in Paris in 1957. Initially these works (which deliberately and controversially ignored every age-old law of painting: somewhat as Scarpitta’s “bandage strips” would later on, or as Burri’s “burlap sacks” had at the start of the decade) adhered to the non-figural dictates of contemporary pictorial research. A heightened materialism, recognizable also in this particular Décollage, governed the image. By contrast, from the early 1960s onwards, Rotella’s Décollages gradually began to leave intact part of the figure on the poster: in this way his images ended up resembling those made fashionable by US pop art.