Italian-born Argentine artist Libero Badíi arrived in Buenos Aires with his family when he was eleven years old. In the 1950s, when he first travelled around South America, he encountered Indigenous cultures that would have a major impact on his art. Badíi was not only a sculptor, draughtsman, painter, ceramicist, and printmaker, but also the maker of over fifty artist’s books. Arte Siniestro [uncanny art] emerged in the mid-1960s in reaction to the avant- gardes of the time. Though developed by Badíi and Argentine painter Luis Centurión, Badíi was the one who placed the uncanny at the centre of his artistic production from the late 1960s through the 1970s. For Badíi, the idea of the uncanny in art is bound to forms unknown – or, perhaps, soon to be known – by the simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar Indigenous cultures of the Americas, as opposed to the classic European aesthetic tradition. Like his other works from this period, the production process for the polychrome Autorretrato siniestro (1978) entailed assembling wooden boards and rods and placing scraps of wood on the work’s surface. The figure brings to mind the Indigenous cult ures that had made such an impact on the artist during his trip to the South American Altiplano.
—Sonia Becce
