Cavenago Milano Est 10 minuti, 2003

There is a motorway that utters the artist’s name every day without realising it. Along the A4 in Italy, on the many journeys that took Cavenago to teach at the ‘Carrara’ Academy of Fine Arts in Bergamo, during the years when the artist was still living and working in Italy, an illuminated sign announces a random direction, the time it takes to reach a destination: Cavenago, East Milan, ten minutes. ‘Cavenago’ is merely a place, the name of a municipality in the Lombardy plain, passed through every night by thousands of headlights that do not stop to read it.

It must be said, first and foremost, that this photograph occupies a rare place in the artist’s career. Cavenago’s photographic body of work is, in fact, limited, almost marginal compared to the rest of his output: when photography appears in his work, it almost always does so in a documentary capacity, in the service of sculpture and installation, as a tool for making notes aimed at the creation of a three-dimensional work, not to be a work in its own right. Cavenago Milano Est 10 minuti, on the other hand, is one of the rare exceptions in which photography breaks free from this ancillary role and becomes an autonomous work, capable of standing on its own artistic merit without referring to anything other than itself.

And it is precisely in this exception – captured on a stretch of Italian motorway travelled almost out of habit (that of his past journeys to and from the Academy in Bergamo) – that the artist allows himself a touch of subtle irony. The photograph was taken with a long exposure, an extended period during which the light settles, layers and accumulates on the surface of the panel, just as it would naturally in any night-time shot of this kind. But here, the effect of the long exposure is not enough to explain everything: amongst the lettering on the sign, one word stands out as brighter than the rest – the name of the motorway exit, Cavenago, and it is precisely at that point that the artist introduces a small, calculated manipulation: an intensity of light that the exposure time alone would not have produced. In short, the sign does not light up on its own: it is the artist who makes it light up, with the same discretion with which he would sign a work without adding a visible signature.

It is a minimal intervention, almost imperceptible at first glance, which nevertheless alters the meaning of the entire image: no longer a mere chance discovery, a proper name that happens to appear on a road sign, but a small act of silent appropriation, in which the artist literally reclaims his own surname and returns it to the world a little brighter than the road had written it.

After all, ten minutes – the time indicated on the sign – is also the duration of a fleeting thought. Cavenago captures that thought in an isolated image, almost unique within his body of work: the Italian road leading to a place that has never been chosen, but which, for a moment – in a light made more intense by the artist’s hand – resonates as if it had been.