Gregor, 2022

`Gregor Samsa, waking one morning from troubled dreams, found himself transformed in his bed into a huge, unclean insect. He was resting on his back, hard as armour, and lifting his head a little, he could see his arched belly, brown and divided into many curved segments, on top of which the bedspread, close to sliding down all the way, was barely holding on. Her legs, so numerous and slender as to make pity of her normal build, trembled ceaselessly in a confused gleam before her eyes.`

Gregor of a small, compact three-dimensional object made of steel and vegetable wax.

From its very inception, the work occupies an ambiguous interstitial space: it is neither a portrait nor a simple illustration, but a formal translation of the Kafkaesque paradox into sculptural language. The chosen materials – steel for its hardness, vegetable wax for its malleability – do not function as mere allegory, but rather as a device creating tension between material opposites. Steel is a rigid surface, wax is subject to subtle transformations; one closes in, the other suggests a possible yielding. Cavenago thus creates a form which, despite its compactness, retains a disturbing quality: layer by layer, the surface seems to suspend the boundary between organism and artefact.

The choice of the Kafkaesque episode is no accident: in the original narrative, Gregor Samsa’s unexpected metamorphosis overturns the parameters of identity and function, forcing the body to become something else without entirely losing its status as a deformed human figure. In Cavenago’s work, this dialectic is translated into a form that is not easily deciphered. The sculpture is neither a cast of the insect nor an anatomical model: it is rather the echo of a mental metamorphosis rendered in plastic form. The form inscribes itself in space as a body suspended between density and the possibility of movement, as a figure in potential rather than in act.

The work, though small in size, relates to the modernist tradition that analysed the human figure in its ontological degenerations: the sculpture does not represent but rather ‘ ’ evoking a state of transition. In Gregor, the Kafkaesque transformation is translated into a formal stance that does not resolve, that remains poised between presence and repression, between figure and the informal. The wax, combined with the metal, suggests an internal process of flow; the steel, on the other hand, defines a boundary, a frame of rigidity. It is precisely this internal material tensionthat lies at the heart of the sculpture.

Gregor is not a static body, but an object that operates through formal dissonance: like Kafka’s literary episode, it calls into question the stability of categories, suspends identity and compels the viewer to confront that which is ‘other than oneself’ within the very figure of the work.

L.B., 2022