A prova di scemo (autoritratto), 2005

(error-proof personal experience)
by Luca Scarabelli

Trying A prova di scemo is to activate a well-known methodology to understand what sculpture is or in any case to ask a few more questions about its specificity, about the dialectic between material space and body, after the sculpture is dead or was supposed to be dead.

That's the procedure.
Approaching the sculpture A prova di scemo and looking around (perception).
Climbing on the sculpture A prova di scemo (it is different from the prohibition not to touch the sculpture).
Stand up in balance, fairly stable, and take a plastic pose at will (freestyle).
Orientation in the space of sculpture (self-perception).
Maintain the position as much as you want and possibly vary it (performative act).
Get down from the sculpture A prova di scemo (detachment).
Looking around one more time (question).

Alternative to feel the absence of the body: look at the sculpture A prova di scemo and not to risk anything, walk away (conservative act).

A prova di scemo would be called a pedestal sculpture, when the sculpture has long since abandoned the pedestal. In fact, A prova di scemo tests the very idea of stasis. A stalled plastic form? There is something physical in testing it to anticipate the idea of possible movement. Which, let's say it now, won't be there.
Sculpture, almost always and eternally, apart from a few results that can be found scrolling through the 20th century, is to be considered a sort of kerbstone, it doesn't move and it doesn't move, it moves around it instead, you can be close to it or far away from it, sometimes inside it, but it is always there in the same place.
Umberto's sculpture underlines this tendency, but betraying it in its attitude, it tugs at it and says stop. She mimics him. It is still, blocked, but it wants to move. Other of his sculptures do indeed move, with movements that are sometimes abrupt and others very slow, others to be accompanied, others unexpected... especially in the works in which he measures the distances between us and things, between things and the space they occupy through potentially active elements.
On these roller skates, we can also call this sculpture in freedom and friendship (over time Umberto has used these two titles to refer to this work), we do not move, if anything we test ourselves like fools in an attempt to move. Skates, when they are skates and not interpretations of skates, are prostheses of the body that make it possible to accelerate movement, to shorten time and space in crossing places. Just don't slip and fall.

With these skates, the test fails in advance. They are skates of impossibility.

This impossibility transforms the 'passenger' into a statue, with the possibility of moving but remaining alert and still in place. A contact is made. You are ideally centred, you are there and positioned as in a sketch. You are a sketch of the sculpture, you share the same space, you are a volume of the sculpture even if you are not 'sculpture', not even for a minute... Meanwhile, each work is a pair of skates, one on each foot, just as you would expect to find them. The reference is to traditional skates for recreational use, those with the arrangement of the four square wheels that allow you to move on the ground, run and perform evolutions. The production includes examples in Cor-Ten steel and others in Carrara marble, originally with prototypes in galvanised steel. On the supporting surface is a number relating to shoe size (I tried A prova di scemo with a size 43½, which then fit me slightly large, but it was comfortable to stand on), so they are made to measure. The pose I tried to interpret in my stance was one that was a bit fixed, from memory as in August Sander's photographs. Better, I sought the attitude, the pause, so as not to get carried away in more articulate situations. Just with a few tricks in preparation for the meeting, with a dedicated outfit that recalled a strange craft: upturned t-shirt, stained apron, bare legs and feet. Something objectively Sander-like then, with a hieratic and detached look. At that moment I thought that it is a work that makes the gaze move, you look at the world from its place and fix your perception. The weight is lightened, you are on the edge of im-space.

This work, let's face it, is a masterstroke within Umberto Cavenago's entire oeuvre. Or at any rate, I have always liked it a lot, even in the title, with that subdued reference to the world of work, production and design so dear to Umberto, fool-proof as in error-proof... a test to the limit, a constraint on behaviour that avoids errors of distraction for example. Thus Umberto orients us within a procedure, also of linguistic construction, of making sculpture, in the midst of the post-postmodern era. Twice post. And he winks at the modern, because the workmanship, I would almost say brutalist architect, stands there and holds together that raw material that conveys strength, character, equality, decision, power. At the same time it is simple and minimal, with an almost classical flavour. Sculpture as an almost relational device to challenge and move thought with zero emissions. An industrial 'bachelor machine' that accompanies us in acting the moment we stop. A revealing game; you go up, you define a real space, you are in the space, you go out but you don't go out and you fail.

The work is no longer in front of the spectator, it is below. One looks at one's feet and then descends.