Mimmo Rotella, 1981

Between 1980 and 1982 Italian artist Mimmo Rotella, by then famous for his 'décollage' works, created a series of ‘blanks’ where he covered advertising posters with colourful tissue paper. If with the 'décollages', realised by tearing posters taken directly from the streets of Rome, the artist had discovered the infinite possibilities of the popular image, with the blanks (also called “coperture” in Italian), he set out to explore the temporal and linguistic limits of this mode of communication. The street and the city were once again sources of inspiration for the artist who, wandering around Milan, discovered how posters were covered up by monochrome pieces of paper once their display time on the city walls was over. Fascinated by those hidden messages obliterated by somewhat anonymous sheets of paper, he started to create the blanks: a process erasing the chaos and disorder produced by the superimposition typical of his 'décollages'. Rotella covered the works with a new skin made of monochrome tissue paper, thus revealing the infinite possibilities of colour, transparency, and a simple action’s potency.

Precisely in the expressive potential stemming from the relationship between what covers and what is covered lies the element of surprise, something the artist was particularly interested in and an essential component of the blanks. Another significant feature is the creasing in the paper generated when glueing the thin tissue onto the canvas. In the blanks, the artist deliberately left visible those wrinkles to draw attention to their particular formal value. As if they were lines on the skin of the picture, they animate the surface which, traversed by little waves of paper and slight furrows, swells and bulges.

The trace - that underneath area which remains uncovered, emerging from behind the monochrome sheets - is expansively visible in Giallo- Bianco-Nero (1980), where it appears on the sides and the upper portion of the composition. It reveals some details of what seems to be a cartoon character extending beyond and under the flat monochrome yet playful yellow of the sheet of paper.