Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is proud to present
Collage and décollage as similar mediums
Mazaccio & Drowilal, Mimmo Rotella
“These images have a deceptive character which contradicts the sensationalism they would like to convey”. Robert Drowilal
“Through the tangle of tears, moreover, the billboard image, in itself pleasant but necessarily illustrative, is charged with unexpected dynamism and richness of signs“. Elena Pontiggia, Tra sogno e mito, in Mimmo Rotella, multipli décollages, SilvanaEditoriale, Cinisello Balsamo, Milan, IT, 2004, pp. 12-13
Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is pleased to present an OVR dedicated to the French duo Mazaccio & Drowilal and Mimmo Rotella. The OVR focuses on comparing the two techniques used by the artists, namely collage and décollage, understood as expressive mediums characteristic of the practices of the two artists.
The practice of collage, used by the French duo Mazaccio & Drowilal, is a technique that the duo has developed by taking images of celebrities photographed and published in magazines. The starting point of the Paparazzi series is a collection of photographs of famous personalities taken during their daily activities, such as shopping and golf, all characterized by being taken by paparazzi.
”We realized how celebs were photographed while performing the same gestures, and how these images promoted lifestyles and role models… Their influence is huge, and that’s precisely why we aim to analyze and tweak them. Through accumulation, the exception is made trivial. Creating a typology and gathering those images in the same picture allows for the sensational side to be neutralized; and we find the shift from the ‘scoop’ of catching a celeb to the anonymity of a crowd, playful and meaningful”. Robert Drowilal
What might seem like a simple digital collage to an inexperienced eye is a complex and meticulous process. The procedure followed by Mazaccio & Drowilal involves an initial phase of extensive iconographic research, followed by manual cropping and a lengthy process of recontextualizing the photos within expansive and intricate settings, to create typical, ridiculous, and humor-filled situations. The manually created collage is then photographed again and becomes an image printed in three copies.
In stark contrast is the décollage that Mimmo Rotella embarked upon in 1953. Inspired by the evocative power of torn and overlapping advertising posters, the artist undertakes the gesture of tearing advertising posters from city walls and then reconstructing them in the printing laboratory, only to tear them freely by hand, based on his intention to create overlays of conceptually different content. The tearing reveals subsequent layers and creates new meanings.
The two techniques of collage and décollage, seemingly opposite, reveal similar traits, such as the appropriation of popular imagery in the form of ready-mades, and both are employed for semantic recontextualization.
