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 and 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. This reference is important because it explains that the roots of Paparella’s visual tradition can be found in Mediterranean culture, a fact that the artist himself had pointed out at an earlier date. During the military dictatorship (1976–83) Nelly Kriger de Perazzo, the art critic, was the cultural representative of the de facto administration and directed the Museo de Artes Plásticas Eduardo Sivori [Eduardo Sivori Museum of Visual Arts] from 1977 until 1983. Nevertheless, her exhibition policy had a powerful influence on the formal revision of Argentinean art, especially Concrete Art. In her review of Paparella’s work, Perazzo studies the iconography of the pastels produced by the artist, who died a couple of years earlier. This document is also important because it shows the kind of scholarly art criticism that was commonly published during the dictatorship and which contained not a hint of the repressive conditions created by the military regime.
