You'll Never Guess What These Stunning Sculptures Are Made Of

The undulating curves draw the eye into their sinuous patterns. The almost alien-looking ripples resemble a strange deep-sea organism or a wind-carved desert on a foreign planet. 

The truth is both more mundane and more mind-blowing: These mesmerizing structures are sculptures made of paper, created by Italian artist Daniele Papuli. 

Papuli has been making paper sculptures since 1995, but, he told The Huffington Post, he'd been working toward the same effect in more classical materials for some time. "I tried many different materials such as stone, wood, plaster, unconsciously following a route, a continual passage from gravity to the lightness of the form, from the solidity of the matter to its ductility," he said. "The volumes grew thinner and thinner [...] at last I reached paper, paper handling."

While sculpture more traditionally involves taking material away to reveal an artwork within stone or clay, working with paper, for Papuli, means transforming the two-dimensional into a three-dimensional structure. "I resolved ‘to build’ a shape choosing the sheet of paper as unit of measure," he told HuffPost. "I was fascinated by light and thick textures, by the structural potentialities of surfaces, by this matter -- alive, vibrating, changeable. A matter characterized by a physical, tactile pleasure apparently hidden in its more usual shape, flat and bidimensional."

By cutting, arranging, and iterating patterns with the paper, he transformed the flat, plain pages into unrecognizable landscapes and textured falls.

The inspiration behind Papuli's installations, ethereal as they seem, lies close to home. "I come from the south of Italy, Salento, a little region of Puglia, where color, light, landscape, wind, emotions are very strong and I can say have taken root in me," he said. Papuli told HuffPost that the saturated sunlight and vivid landscapes of his home provide artistic fuel, inspiring him with the way the sunlight and shadows fall starkly in the fields. 

Papuli sees paper as a limitless medium. "According to the way in which it is moved, touched, cut, paper offers me numberless sensorial, visual and tactile suggestions engendered by its new structure," he said. Viewing his installations, it would be difficult to disagree.

Check out more of Papuli's work below, or on his website: