Aldo Paparella (Minturno, Italy, 1920–Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1977) fought in Africa during the Second WW and was taken prisoner in France. He arrived in Argentina in 1950, bringing a new approach to non-figurative, Informalist sculpture. In the late-1950s, in his Sugerencias [Suggestions] series, he started working with waste materials. His aggressive use of sheet metal gave it an informal quality, and Paparella began to think from the perspective of the object itself, rather than from any traditional concepts rooted in the language of sculpture. This idea is developed in his Muebles inútiles [Useless Furniture]. In the early-1970s he makes the Monumentos inútiles [Useless Monuments], his most significant work, out of humble materials.In this document, Paparella discusses a variety of issues that are essential to an understanding of his work, such as his opposition to the consumer society. In an increasingly commercial world, an artist must indeed espouse a truly heroic asceticism. As a postwar artist, Paparella was a humanist in his approach to artistic expression, which he considered to be a manifestation of one’s own free will. That attitude was not, however, a proclamation of extreme individualism—especially in times of artistic collectivization—but rather a defensive reaction against both the controlling tendencies of the consumer society and the demotion of the artist to the role of salesman. This is perhaps the source of those references to ‘inutilidad” [“uselessness”] in his work, and of his penchant for secretiveness.
