The Italian Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Rotella is counted as an adherent of Nouveau Réalisme, although he never signed the manifesto of that movement. Unlike American Pop Art, which took aim at the consumer society on the basis of a visual idiom derived from popular culture, the intention of Nouveau Réalisme was to introduce reality into the image itself by means of collages and assemblages. In this way, the new realists transformed the ‘ordinary’ observable reality into a more abstract and socially-critical image of it.
