Gregorio, 2008

The small drawing from 1988 (Gregor, oil pastel and acrylic on card) depicted a vehicle lying upside down on its back, its wheels pointing skywards, unable to right itself: a direct sculptural interpretation of the opening lines of Kafka’s story in which Gregor Samsa wakes up on his back, his legs flailing without finding a foothold. Twenty years later, that initial intuition finally found its realisation in steel, Gregor, 2008 (29.7 × 21 × 21 cm), a small piece that belongs in every respect to a specific family of works created during those very years, united by a deliberately chosen scale.

The dimensions of Gregor 2008 are not, in fact, arbitrary: they coincide – like those of Senza titolo in A4 (2007) and Senza titolo in triplo A4 (2007, exactly three times the length) – with the standard A4 sheet format extended into three dimensions. It is a family of works, which also includes Cyber (2008) and, later, Pungolo (Impfmachine) (2008–2021), conceived not for the floor but for the wall: small steel structures fitted with wheels that do not touch the ground but rest directly against the vertical surface of the wall, suspended off the floor as explicitly stated in the description of Pungolo.

It is here that the inversion imagined in 1988 undergoes a further, more sophisticated metamorphosis. In the original design, the vehicle lay horizontally and upside down, its useless wheels pointing towards the ceiling. In the 2008 version, the inversion is no longer horizontal but vertical: the entire object is rotated by ninety degrees and hoisted onto the wall, so that the wheels, rather than sinking uselessly into thin air as in the early drawing, are now pressed against a vertical surface which they can never truly travel along. It is a different, more elegant form of the same powerlessness: no longer a vehicle overturned and motionless on its back, but a vehicle that has simply changed its surface, swapping the horizontal ground for a wall which nonetheless, in another way, denies any real possibility of rolling.

Gregor, 2022 (steel and vegetable wax, same dimensions as the 2008 version), however, breaks with this wall-mounted solution. No longer intended to be hung, the work returns to a state that is, conceptually, closer to the original 1988 design: a body that lies down, no longer hoisted vertically against a wall but restored to an autonomous, almost reclining presentation. And, compared to the previous version, it introduces a second material – vegetable wax – which brings with it a new kind of instability: whereas steel is rigid and definitive, the wax is subject to potential yielding, to a malleability that alludes precisely to that organic and vulnerable condition in which Gregor Samsa finds himself at the opening of Kafka’s story, unable to control his transformed body.

Read in its entirety, this small constellation of works—from the inverted drawing of 1988, through the wall-mounted series of 2007–2008, right up to the return to a state closer to the original arrangement in 2022, demonstrates how Cavenago has repeatedly returned, over the course of decades, to the same germinal intuition, varying its spatial orientation and material vocabulary each time, yet without ever abandoning the underlying idea: a body-vehicle that cannot rise again, cannot roll, cannot return to its function, suspended, like Gregor Samsa, in a state of helplessness that time does not resolve, but merely reformulates.