The 1950s were the breeding ground, in Europe, for the birth and growth of the society of images, of simulacra, whose artistic/political formulation would be given by the theory of Guy Debord with his category of the Society of the Spectacle.
[…]
The ferment of the 1950s produced a phenomenon known as Neo-avantgarde and among the first situations to investigate is Nouveau Réalisme, a European, Franco-Italian movement intending to oppose the voices arriving from the United States which would fall under the label of Pop Art.
The year is 1959-1960, and a large group forms of mainly French artists. Spontaneously banding together, they even decide to lay down a common declaration. The artists were Arman, Cesar, Christo, Deschamps, Dufrene, Hains, Yves Klein, Raysse, Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint- Phalle, Spoerri, Tinguely, Villeglé and Pierre Restany, the group’s organiser and theorist.
[…]
I won’t speak of the specific development of the group; I am interested in reasoning about two artists, Hains and Rotella, who were to join the group later, but whose initial work, their period of experimentation, dates from the beginning of the 1950s. Besides, the difficulty in narrating the history of contemporary art arises precisely from the gap between an artist’s beginnings and the discovery of their image and identity; the ability to recognise an artist by analysing his or her works. Neither of these two affichistes was aware of the other’s work. But the poster is not an illustration: since it is an object that has been taken, for each of them it is like a ready-made piece. It is not always not manipulated, at times it is given a profound interpretation, as the poster itself is the invention of an artist.

From Mauro Panzera, Hains – Rotella, artypò décollages saffa, text in the catalog