Rodolfo Aricò (Milan 1930 – 2002) attended the artistic high school in Brera and studied in the Faculty of Architecture in the city’s Polytechnic from 1950 to 1955.
In 1959, he held his first personal exhibition in the Salone Annunciata in Milan. Invited to take part in the Venice Biennale in 1964, he showed a work comprising three large canvases in which square forms were set diagonally. This work anticipated his first "object" in 1966, when his painting starting acquiring consistency and being organised on shaped structures. Yet it was only when he had a personal room of his own at the XXXIV Venice Biennale in 1968 that the structural character of his object-paintings blossomed into the fullness of the three dimensions.
In 1970, at the Salone Annunciata and in the Studio Marconi, he showed works made by spraying various layers of drops of colour. Though apparently thoroughly monochrome, the appearance of the result was deceptive, as, to quote Gillo Dorfles, his painting remained "chromatically ambiguous". In fact, just as the shapes, whether large or small, generated a sort of "perceptive uncertainty", almost as though they were "teasing the continuity of perspective", so too did the uniform colours actually feature a whole host of nuances, as blues, lilacs and violets migrated one into another, so that the final result could be described as almost anything but restricted, far more in fact "an act of expectation, of hypothesis". Guido Ballo also wrote about the mysterious allusiveness of Aricò’s colours, which tended to accentuate the "sense of a beyond not being represented but hinted at through the non-figural nature of the painting, a beyond that leads us to the mystery of existence, to the inexpressible, to our own escape". In an interview with Ballo, the artist himself declared that his colour "is not an additional element, but a constituent one … and it always tends to the improbable, to the changeable, as a matter of fact to existence".
Meanwhile, Aricò was studying fifteenth century painting, leading to his works Arco, Quattrocento and Prospettiva per Paolo Uccello. In 1974, he held an anthological in Palazzo Grassi, in Venice, where he gathered together the corpus of his works, all on a base measuring from four to six metres and conceived since 1968 as a work in progress. In 1980, the exhibition Rodolfo Aricò: Legend and Architecture, was held in the Mantegna house in Mantua. The exhibition’s curator, Gianni Contessi, described the artist’s "architectural tricks", picking up the thread of his reasoning from the feeling of ambiguity already described by Dorfles, not as concrete, rigidly defined constructs, but as an attempt to give some body to the legend of architecture. 
In 1982, he showed in the Palazzo dell'Arte, home of the Milan Triennale, while 1984 brought the exhibition Rodolfo Aricò, in the Contemporary Art Pavilion. In 1986, he was invited to take part in an itinerant exhibition 1960/1985: Aspects of Italian Art, in the Kunstverein in Frankfurt, Berlin, Hanover, Bregenz and Vienna. In the same year, he sent a structure to take part in the “Colour” section at the Venice Biennale. In the following year, L. Meneghelli invited him to take part in an exhibition entitled 20 Years Ago, with Boetti, Gilardi, Kounellis, Paolini and Pistoletto, in Studio La Città, in Verona. He also took part in the exhibition Emotion and Method, curated by Eberard Simons in the Galerie der Künstler, in Munich. 
The nineties brought a long string of exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including the ones in Milan (Galleria Annunciata, Studio Carlo Grossetti, Palazzo della Permanente); Stockholm; Schwaz; Cologne; Bergisch Gladbach (Aspects of Italian Art From the War to the Present Day, together with Fontana, Manzoni, Castellani, Staccioli and others); Venice (the Centennial Biennale. XLVI International Art Exhibition, Ca’ Pesaro); Urbino (Ducal Palace), and Rome (the Quadriennale in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni). The catalogues of his exhibitions were curated by Maurizio Fagiolo Dell’Arco, Giulio Carlo Argan, Roberto Sanesi, Guido Ballo, Gillo Dorfles, Francesco Bartoli and Gianni Contessi.
In the monograph he wrote about the artist for Electa in 1990, Giovanni Maria Accame dwelled at some length on “the light, impassioned papers resulting from a continuous, assiduous and beloved work” in the eighties and nineties. These were his works on paper, not just miniatures with grand outlines, but veritable places of painting, where the dense presence of colour prevailed over form, acting as receptacle for ideas and reflections. “These papers are in fact a diary … here we discover the wealth that is reserved to us by a minor work, that makes no fuss, yet surprises us for its immediacy and, as we know from a fragment of Heraclitus, neither says, nor conceals, but hints”.