To approach the imaginary is to prepare oneself to hear a story of something that is not there, to see something in potential, to project oneself into an apparition.
If you find yourself walking in the middle, then the possibility becomes a perceptive act, an event which you experience directly.
Cavenago – who continually challenges space by building physical machines that are also “vehicles” for imaginary worlds that take shape from his passion for the design culture intertwined with his passion for artistic culture – leads us to confront a contingency in which the rhetorical gap of the imagination is relative, because even in absentia it makes us perceive the world of things, it puts them on stage in a perfect balance between subtraction and presence.
His is a dialectic of encounter between the mental image and the material image, interdependent as Augé writes in The War of Dreams. Dreams and icons chasing each other, the how and the what. Transparency and opacity in fieri Danto would say.
The most complex part of Eccentrica immaginaria, a site-specific work for Surplace, was its translation into a drawing-thing. The first moment in which the idea is fixed is already a constructive act in itself, the representational procedure that manifests itself at the eidetic level – as a mental image, which is not completely lost here – is materialized in a dynamic form, projected into space to articulate it: a challenge, since a problem was to transfer part of the perimeter path of a sector with a tapered eccentric circular crown into reality.

His culture related to function is very physical, technical, productive and at the same time subtly intellectual. A wall of the Surplace exhibition space becomes the “perceptive ground” that topologically organizes the “visual material”.
The architectural element of the wall cuts the form and creates a boundary between what is visible and concrete, and what is imagined and concealed. The windows of the space, the main elements of transformation, are the concrete motif that determined the size and placement of the work.

Cavenago always starts from a stereotype to re-read it, overturn it, or at least exploit it to give it a push elsewhere.
Eccentrica immaginaria is a sculptural device that dwells outside and inside.
His eidetic part on the inside, his physics on the outside.
The image is an unveiled process and here the represented is given in a concrete image. Is the inside still sculpture? Is the outside part (which draws the wall of the building in a new way, which is approached with a metal service staircase, passing right underneath) sufficient for the story? In a game of visual syneddoche in a part of the work no matter is given, but something tells us that it is there, you can’t bump your head against it, but the feeling is that you are in the presence of something. On the outside, the head can actually bump into us. The spectator’s gaze (vigilant and focused on the outside ascent, sharp and questioning on the inside) gives him a voice.
By measuring space, as we do it with him, Cavenago reflects on the constructive possibilities of an object – the desire and the object – but also on how sculpture can affect space and time (the work is strongly linked to the place), invites us to walk in the emptiness of the environment in an eccentric vision.
From the windows of the exhibition space – which form a part of the immaterial dimension – looking outwards, but inside the sculpture, one sees something that sucks in not only the visual perception, but also the auditory perception, through the presence of a conduit in which what one sees and says comes back.
Yes, because Eccentrica immaginaria is also a machine that conducts the sound, manifests it as an attitude... it’s a moment to whisper or scream inside its shape to hear if something comes out the other way. A voice-sound that is also a proof of colour, a proof of effect, a proof of constructive geometry... listen to my words from there. A sculpture heard.
It is an eccentric device that allows us to understand by seeing and to transmit a meaning that is built “inhabiting”, experiencing it, becoming its measure.
There is the laying and lifting, which is the ancient game of sculpting, but translated into an eccentric and imaginative architectural form: that is, one thing is there, and then it is not there but also yes and the space vibrates.
We are in the work.

Luca Scarabelli 

Umberto Cavenago – Eccentrica immaginaria
Varese - 18/06/2017-27/08/2017
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