Piedistallo, 1989

A square sheet of galvanised steel, 210 centimetres on each side and just 45 centimetres high, with two symmetrical ramps, each 180 cm long, on two opposite sides. There is nothing allusive about the craftsmanship: the material is that used in structural steelwork and industrial roofing – mottled grey, hot-dip galvanised – by its very nature far removed from the nobility of marble and the rhetoric of the plinth. Cavenago does not sculpt, but assembles, and the proportions alone convey the complete reversal taking place: the plinth, which by convention is narrow and tall because it elevates, isolates and lifts the object off the ground, here expands in width and lowers until it becomes a platform, a raised section of floor, a manoeuvring surface. The height of 45 centimetres is not an exhibition height; it is a loading height.

The ramps establish the function whilst simultaneously shifting it. They are designed for the ascent and descent of wheeled artefacts, and it is in this technical purpose that their evocative power lies: they recall the steel vehicles exhibited the previous year at the Franz Paludetto Gallery in Turin, with which Cavenago had sought to free sculpture from its traditional display support. The plinth, having just been set aside, thus returns not as an accessory but as a work of art in its own right, and it returns equipped: prepared for a movement that has already taken place or is yet to occur. The surface remains empty, and this emptiness is not a lack but an interval – the time between a descent and a possible ascent. The absent object is more present than it would be if it were standing there.

What presents itself to the eye is therefore a support devoid of the supported object, a device that has absorbed its own content and retains only the conditions of access to it. It is a core element destined to recur, with almost programmatic insistence, throughout his subsequent work: the columns on wheels of the Metropolis colonnade at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in 1991, architectural elements stripped of their load-bearing function; the floor of movable parallelograms in A sostegno dell’Arte, which repaves the art gallery; the sliding bench in L’Arte stanca(1993), which runs through the museum. In Piedistallo, the trajectory is already set out in its entirety, and in its most pared-down form: a sheet metal platform as high as a step, as wide as a room, with an entrance and an exit.