Twenty years after the death of Mimmo Rotella (1918-2006), Palazzo Ducale in Genoa dedicates a major retrospective to one of the absolute protagonists of Italian and international art of the twentieth century. The exhibition Mimmo Rotella. 1945-2005, curated by Alberto Fiz and realized in collaboration with the Mimmo Rotella Foundation, traces over sixty years of the artist's activity, returning the complexity and timeliness of a research that has radically marked the relationship between art, image and contemporary society. The exhibition analyzes the entire creative arc of Rotella, from the first abstract experiments of the Second World War, influenced by surrealism, to the New Icons of recent years, realized through collages and overpictures in which the medial universe is again subjected to a process of deconstruction and re-signification. Over a hundred works from museums, foundations and international public and private collections make up a path divided into five thematic sections, which allows you to rediscover the innovative strength of a language capable, like few others, of telling the birth and evolution of the image and consumption society. The focus of the exhibition is the decollage, the most radical gesture-symbol of Rotella. The tear becomes an absolute and disruptive act, capable of opening new doors to perception and redefining the relationship between art and life. As the curator Alberto Fiz says, "what is on the surface no longer matters, but the fragmentary and fragmented aspect of a real dimension destined to change under the complicit gaze of the observer". On display at the Doge's Palace are some of the artist's most emblematic works, including Naturalistic (1953), collage on canvas with mirrors and glass, The Tiger (1962), The Point and a Half (1963), among the first interventions on the advertising world, and Tender is the night (1962), alongside a selection of works dedicated to his most famous icon, Maril Mon Among the later works stand out a large untitled of the Nineties, decollage on sheet metal of three meters, and Attenti, the last large decollage made by the artist. Always guided by a deep attention to the fragment, Rotella has transformed the tear into an aesthetic and political gesture, in an act of revelation that lays bare the truth hidden behind the images of consumption. Alongside the decollages, the exhibition explores his most experimental techniques – from art to effaç This desire to go beyond the surface, investigating the matter in its deepest aspects, leads Rotella in the Eighties towards overpictures, in autonomous dialogue with the return to painting that characterizes many European experiences, including the Transavanguardia. In the same way, the artist does not renounce the comparison with graffiti, just as in the Sixties he had been able to measure himself with Pop Art. Set up in the rooms of the Loggia degli Abati, the exhibition is also enriched with archival materials and audiovisual documents that contribute to building an immersive journey, capable of returning the complexity of a central figure in the history of contemporary art. Celebrating Mimmo Rotella twenty years after his death means recognizing, even in the age of social media, the surprising timeliness of his gaze and the strength of an art that continues to question the role of images, the fragility of memory and the beauty of creative disorder.