Líbero Badii (Arezzo, Italy, 1916-Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2001) was a sculptor whose main output consisted of works of symbolic significance. During the 1950s, following a trip through Latin America, his work was influenced by pre-Columbian art. He created the concept of "the sinister" as both a form of knowledge and a way of feeling. He named his studio-workshop Almataller [SoulShop].
This document helps us to grasp more fully Badii's understanding of the term "sinister" as it relates to the materials he used in his sculptures. Ever since the fifties, he had explored the ability of matter to express an inaccessible reality that is beyond human understanding. His quest for the dissolution of the autonomy of art languages led him to first explore his materials and then to abandon them; interestingly, this happened once Badii had achieved an extraordinary level of technical mastery over them. These changes express the idealistic nature of his work: matter itself representing the possibility of accessing a state of being. It is undoubtedly in the polychrome wooden pieces—in his opinion, color is the signature element of the quintessentially American, the legacy of pre-Colombian cultures which he considers to be a conceptual block—where the idea of matter (essence, dissolution of language, historical reading, and a spatial command based on planes and colors) achieves its most relevant expression.