On the occasion of the 18th Giornata del Contemporaneo, Saturday October 8, 2022, dedicated to the theme of ecology, bound up with that of sustainability: "global issues that place us before the need to rethink the contemporary art system through a renewed awareness and a more widespread sensitivity towards the theme", the Associazione Paolo Scheggi, through its social networks pages (Facebook and Instagram) and its website, proposes a focus on Paolo Scheggi's early series, the Lamiere [Metal sheets] (1958-1960). Perhaps not everyone knows, in fact, that these artworks, destined to open up and later translate into the deeply excavated forms of the artist's best-known Intersuperfici a Zone riflesse [Reflected Zones] and Intersuperfici curve [Curved Intersurfaces], were born from discarded materials that Scheggi, from the late 1950s, collected from the streets and garages: metal sheets shaped by time that, instead of being thrown away, were folded, overlapped, and welded to form sheets full of perspective.
"[...] Scheggi, in searching for 'his' language, feels the need to excavate and open up the steel sheet: his imagination thus leads him to uncover the space suggested by Fontana's canvas, the lips of the cut open outwards and reveal another space, another sheet of metal". This is how Germano Celant described it when he thought back on these early works a few years later, in 1967.
Scheggi himself called this working technique "saldage"; these were the years of existentialism and Informalism, marked by the readings of Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre, whom the artist met personally in Rome: the French philosopher also wrote an essay for the "Il Malinteso" magazine, founded by Scheggi with Florentine friends and colleagues in the early 1960s.