Erratico reversibile, 2019

Cor-Ten Steel and magnets
60 × 60 × 60 cm
A procedure to remove
Sculpture is the art of giving form to an object from a raw material.
In the case of the traditional marble block, the material is taken away, sculpted or removed with a suitable tool.
The process of taking away consists of obtaining a form from a block of material. Using drills, chisels and hammers, the material is removed bit by bit until the figure emerges. This was Michelangelo's favourite technique.
Can the process of sculpture be traced backwards?
Can the creation of the form after it has taken place be reversed by returning the block to its original condition?
Is sculpture reversible?
A formal enigma
Erratic reversible, it is a formal enigma, a sculpture that takes shape only to melt and reshape itself, questioning the very essence of sculptural three-dimensionality. With its steel structure and the magnetic system that binds the elements together, the work offers itself as an overturned "procedure to remove", a plastic form that rejects the irreversibility of the gesture.
How can one define a sculpture that never wants to stop, that abandons the fixity of marble and chisel for the call of a continuous possibility of transformation?
In Erratico reversibile, the creative process never ends, but becomes reversible and unstable, transporting the object out of the dimension of finished artefact. One could say that here the sculpture becomes a temporal device, an appearance and disappearance of form, an installation that, by its very nature, is incomplete and unfinished.
Thus, instead of the solid immutability of traditional sculpture, Cavenago opts for a tension towards the indeterminate, subverting the process and the act of sculpting itself. In the magnetism that holds the fragments together, the work suggests a perpetually transitory form, a space in which 'removal' is not understood as loss, but as possibility: a constant return to raw material. In this openness to reversibility, Erratico reversibile becomes the site of an open play, a surface of appearances that can be dismantled, reformed, reborn.
There is no longer the monument, but the very idea of reversibility as a creative principle, a paradigm in which the sculpture is never fixed, but always ready to vanish, to withdraw into itself, almost to disown its own existence.
L.B.

Building of Erratico reversibile at Rebuzzi.it

Erratico reversibile, 2019

Cor-Ten Steel and magnets
60 × 60 × 60 cm
A procedure to remove
Sculpture is the art of giving form to an object from a raw material.
In the case of the traditional marble block, the material is taken away, sculpted or removed with a suitable tool.
The process of taking away consists of obtaining a form from a block of material. Using drills, chisels and hammers, the material is removed bit by bit until the figure emerges. This was Michelangelo's favourite technique.
Can the process of sculpture be traced backwards?
Can the creation of the form after it has taken place be reversed by returning the block to its original condition?
Is sculpture reversible?
A formal enigma
Erratic reversible, it is a formal enigma, a sculpture that takes shape only to melt and reshape itself, questioning the very essence of sculptural three-dimensionality. With its steel structure and the magnetic system that binds the elements together, the work offers itself as an overturned "procedure to remove", a plastic form that rejects the irreversibility of the gesture.
How can one define a sculpture that never wants to stop, that abandons the fixity of marble and chisel for the call of a continuous possibility of transformation?
In Erratico reversibile, the creative process never ends, but becomes reversible and unstable, transporting the object out of the dimension of finished artefact. One could say that here the sculpture becomes a temporal device, an appearance and disappearance of form, an installation that, by its very nature, is incomplete and unfinished.
Thus, instead of the solid immutability of traditional sculpture, Cavenago opts for a tension towards the indeterminate, subverting the process and the act of sculpting itself. In the magnetism that holds the fragments together, the work suggests a perpetually transitory form, a space in which 'removal' is not understood as loss, but as possibility: a constant return to raw material. In this openness to reversibility, Erratico reversibile becomes the site of an open play, a surface of appearances that can be dismantled, reformed, reborn.
There is no longer the monument, but the very idea of reversibility as a creative principle, a paradigm in which the sculpture is never fixed, but always ready to vanish, to withdraw into itself, almost to disown its own existence.
L.B.

Installazione al castello visconteo di Locarno

Photo © Cosimo Filippini

Cloister of Sant'Agostino, Pietrasanta

Photo © Bart Herreman
Photo © Bart Herreman
Photo © Bart Herreman

Cloister of Sant'Agostino, Pietrasanta

Building of Erratico reversibile at Rebuzzi.it

Building of Erratico reversibile at Rebuzzi.it

Building of Erratico reversibile at Rebuzzi.it

Building of Erratico reversibile at Rebuzzi.it

Building of Erratico reversibile at Rebuzzi.it

Building of Erratico reversibile at Rebuzzi.it

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