Rosso Romano (1956) forms part of Mimmo Rotella’s early décollage practice, a body of work that
emerged from his engagement with the visual language of post-war urban environments. Rather
than constructing images through additive means, Rotella works subtractively, tearing and
reassembling layers of found posters to create compositions that sit between abstraction and
figuration. In these early works, fragments of typography, colour, and image are partially revealed
and obscured, allowing the surface to operate as both material and image simultaneously.
The composition is built through successive layers of paper, distressed and weathered through both
process and time. Rotella’s gestures—ripping, peeling, and exposing—introduce a physicality that
disrupts any singular reading of the image, replacing clarity with texture and fragmentation. The
resulting surface is dense and tactile, where colour emerges unevenly and visual information is
dispersed across the work rather than centrally organised.