In the sandals of Dalila Puzzovio

Buenos Aires, 1950. Dalila Puzzovio is 8 years old and jumps out of bed, like almost every morning, to start drawing.

Dalila is the youngest of the first generation of Argentines in a family from Lecce , southern Italy . Her grandfather is a landscaper. Armando , her father, is an engineer who displays blueprints even on the kitchen table. Eva , her mother, is a homemaker who sews for pleasure. She dresses differently than any other mother. “Always divine,” Dalila thinks.

There are days when a couple of visits revolutionize the house: when the Italian sailors drop by to bring samples of new fabrics , and when the tailor arrives and whips out designs like rabbits out of a hat. It's a happy ritual, like birthdays. For Dalila, it's another celebration.

Eva and Armando have no problem with Dalila wanting to be an artist . They won't let her drop out of Nuestra Señora de la Misericordia school in the Belgrano neighborhood, but they will buy her an easel . And they won't be bothered when she, who always wore a starched uniform, puts on boxer shorts that she'll buy near Luna Park.

Dalila studied with surrealist painter Juan Battle Planas and conceptual artist Jaime Davidovich . In 1961, she exhibited her informalist painting for the first time: stains, textures, little-explored materials, adoration for the (supposedly) spontaneous: the gesture.

Meanwhile, Armando helps her carry casts thrown away at the Italian Hospital for her first installation, Cáscaras , a pioneer among other works and artists, of the “art of things.”

That definition, "the art of things," is Rafael Squirru , founder of the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, and brother of Dalila's longtime partner, the artist Charlie Squirru.

With plaster casts, Dalila will create funeral wreaths and corsets. Sinister pop . But it will be the platform sandals she will design and manufactured by the Grimoldi family that will become one of her greatest emblems and of the Di Tella Institute , the great breeding ground for avant-garde movements.

The work Dalila. Doble Plataforma (1964) includes fluorescent pairs, displayed on an acrylic shelf and, simultaneously, in Grimoldi 's windows: "art-consumption, consumption-art." Furthermore, "I helped short girls," she once said.

The other Dalila icon is Self-Portrait (1966), a monumental image with her face and the body of the German model Verushka (the one with the key appearance in Blow up, by Michelangelo Antonioni , based on a great story by Cortázar ), dressing room lamps, plastic cushions and a "poem" with texts from Vogue magazine.

Dalila did it all : costumes for Gasalla and Libertad Le Blanc ("I would try on a bracelet and then she would get naked"), kitchen aprons made by Teatro Colón artisans for Pinky , and hats for Dior . And the list goes on.

Until February, the Moderno is dedicating an exhibition to her, Dalila Puzzovio. Self-Portrait , showcasing hits and previously unreleased material. It even offers a playlist of songs from Di Tella's golden '60s.

Body, fashion, identity, and consumption are Dalila's themes. And she always addresses them with warmth; sometimes sarcasm, and always depth.

You know that a T-shirt isn't just cotton: it can be the echo of adolescence, a song, a mistake . A piece of your emotional archive. A document of the time, uncanonized. And you smile and laugh with Dalila. But everything leads to more.

You don't have to be Marcel Duchamp (he of the urinal as a work of art) to understand that the commonplace doesn't have to be banal. Nor that the banal can be, is, political.