Motocicletta, 1988

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I started building motorcycle-looking artefacts. Not objects to admire, but forms to question. Apparently vehicles, but devoid of function. Just a starting idea, a compressed energy, like a tension not yet expressed. Suspended entities, waiting for a revelation that will never come. The proportions were those of real motorbikes, but without motor or movement. Some leaned against the wall, others on stands, like technical models or relics. All with the same design hypothesis: to evoke a vehicle ready to go, but stationary. In suspension. A motion that is never accomplished, a journey that has never begun. I made them with sheet metal, cut, bent and assembled in an essential way. A direct gesture, without technicalities, like a return to the essence. As if my work wanted to say: don't look for easy answers, there are no definitive solutions. Sculpture is not an answer, but a question. Those works, equipped with wheels and defunctionalised, alluded to a missed movement. Means without purpose. And in that gap, between the appearance of the vehicle and the impossibility of the journey, a space opened up: a space for sculpture, for thought, a place to stop and reflect on the immobility of existence. I never considered them finished. Each exhibition was a temporary stop, never an arrival. Changing place, changing light, changing reading. They are not motionless, but neither are they mobile. They are waiting full of possibilities, without definitive answers. And that is where I want to be. I do not project objects to look at, but questions that transform immobility into waiting. In that suspension lies their being without being, becoming without ever coming to full completion, where there is never a definitive 'end', but a process in constant waiting, a journey that never really begins. A tension that resides in their immobility, which is never static, but always waiting for a movement that is never fully accomplished.

U.C.

The focus is no longer on reducing volume, but on the possibility of constructing a recognisable form using the minimum number of elements.

The motorbike is not depicted. It is reconstructed from its essential structure. The engine, the mechanics and every functional detail disappear. All that remains is a system of planes, sections and voids capable of evoking the idea of the vehicle without describing it.

The work belongs neither to abstraction nor to figuration. It occupies an intermediate zone, where the form still retains a memory of the real object but is organised according to an autonomous logic. Every element is reduced to a constructive synthesis. It is not a matter of simplifying an existing image, but of reconstructing its fundamental principle.

Even the wheels take on a new meaning. They are no longer mere components of the vehicle, but become the point of balance for the entire composition. They introduce into the space a continuous tension between stillness and movement. The motorbike appears ready to set off, yet remains permanently suspended in that moment just before action. The sculpture does not represent movement. It makes the anticipation of movement visible.

With this work, the vehicle definitively ceases to be a subject. It becomes a device through which to interrogate sculpture itself. What matters is not the machine, but the possibility of transforming a functional form into an autonomous construction, capable of retaining the energy of the original object whilst having lost all function.

This direction will underpin all subsequent research. From C-DUU to the mobile structures, right through to the Erratici and the Souvenir di montagna, movement will never be represented as action, but as a potential condition of form. The sculpture does not describe a displacement; it contains it.

Motocicletta thus marks the transition from an exploration of volume to one of structure. It is no longer mass that constructs the work’s presence, but the relationship between its parts, the precision of their balance and the silent tension that continues to hold them in a state of permanent possibility.