In line with the European experimentation of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mimmo Rotella creates his décollage by appropriating advertising found on Rome’s walls and then manipulating this already found and destroyed object by further tearing, stitching and rearranging the material to his desired effect. Forze Armate is particularly relevant to the artist’s production since it directly addresses a subject with which he was very much involved in his youth. In 1941, Rotella was conscripted to the Italian army (Forze Armate) for a few years during the Second World War. This experience was quite traumatic for the budding artist. He was eventually able to sublimate it in his work, creating a different perspective on the subject, which was more cinematographic and more imaginative. Compared to yet another provocative work in the sale, Maurizio Cattelan’s Untitled (Christmas ’95) (lot 20), Rotella’s Forze Armate is much more playful and less iconoclastic, even if the celebration of the Forze Armate is torn apart and appears to the viewer as an event that belongs more to the recent past than to the present.