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 document is significant because it provides insights into the opinions expressed by Aldo Pellegrini (1903–73)—an important critic linked to the surrealist trend—on the subject of Paparella’s work. This exhibition was of fundamental importance in Paparella’s career because of its definition of his work as “useless furniture” and “fixtures,” a use of terminology which the artist appropriated in order to give greater scope to the language of sculpture. 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 in Argentina—but rather a defensive reaction against both the controlling tendencies of the consumer society and the demotion of the artist to the role of mere salesman. This is perhaps the source of those references to “uselessness” in his work, and of his penchant for secretiveness. In this document, Pellegrini expresses his thoughts concerning the duality he sees in Paparella’s work—a fusion of the rational-mathematical with the irrational-vital. According to the artist, however, his work is more in the nature of a contrast between freedom and commerce, between matter and the ideal, between a classic tradition and the material. Pellegrini was also, at that time, opposed to the consumer society and its degrading effect on the individual. On the other hand, series such as Artefactos [Fixtures] and Muebles inútiles could also be interpreted as being within the tradition of Surrealist assemblage.