Joseph Masheck has this to say about De Andrea's sculptures:

In a real room, the feeling that these figures are altogether inanimate is actually the source of their disappointment as well as of their fascination; we feel the full impact of the fact that, unlike real men, women, and works of art [!], these objects lack souls. The soul, as the Scholatics describe it, is the animating principal in a thing...The stillness of these figures is not a stillness of repose. It is the mortuary stillness of bodies trapped in lifeless moments...By comparison with these works, George Segal's plaster figures have a soulful animation...

So in a sense these works are not sculptures at all, but antimatter counterparts to sculptures. The reverse Suzanne Langer's dinstinction: "it is expression of biological feeling, not suggestion of biological function, that constitutes 'life' in sculpture" (193)

Peter Brooks expands this view in interesting ways.