Lo Schermo

In “Lo Schermo” Italian artist Mimmo Rotella uses a film still from Jean Luc Godard’s nouvelle vague classic “A bout de soufflé” (in English Breathless). The image shows the movie’s two main protagonists, played by Jean Seberg and Jean Paul Belmondo, two stars of European cinema in the 1960s. Belmondo plays the small-time criminal Michel, on the run from the police and seeking refuge with the American student Patricia, played by Seberg. He falls in love with her, but Patricia decides to inform the police. Michel is then shot by the police. Rotella transfers the film still as a silkscreen print onto canvas, which is therefore the medium both for the cinema film and for the work in the exhibition. This makes “Lo Schermo” technically and stylistically very different from the decollage pictures that Rotella was known for. In these, he used torn posters or layers of posters that he transferred to canvas and partly overpainted. Here it is the stars of American and European films that fascinate Rotella. He had already explored the “icons of cinema” in a series of torn movie posters entitled “Cinecitta” in 1958.