Plinto, 1995

Plinto is configured as a work that questions and revisits the concept of the plinth, that archetypal element that traditionally supports and enhances what stands above it. The artist, in a daring gesture, introduces a roller underneath, creating a destabilisation that reverses the expectations associated with monumentality. In this way, the plinth tilts, losing its celebratory functionality and assuming a character of precariousness.

This tension between stability and vulnerability becomes manifest, revealing how the act of supporting can turn into an act of questioning. The plinth, far from being a simple support, becomes a symbol of fragility, representing a critical reflection on power structures and the value attributed to what is exalted. Cavenago invites us to reconsider the idea of the monument, proposing a work that challenges aesthetic and ideological conventions. The presence of the roller, as a destabilising element, raises questions about our perception of support and celebration, emphasising how strength may lie in vulnerability itself. Plinto becomes an invitation to explore the delicate balance between elevation and fall, between celebration and disintegration. The work, with its inclination, not only displaces the idea of monumentality, but offers a field of reflection on the precariousness inherent in any act of support. In this context, Cavenago leads us towards a new understanding of art, in which inclination becomes the symbol of a humanity in search of meaning and authenticity.

L.B.

Plinto forms an integral part – albeit with a significant difference in scale and choice of materials – of the extensive A sostegno dell’Arte series that Cavenago created between the late 1980s and the following decades. Chronologically, it is situated precisely halfway between the Berlin pillars of A sostegno dell’Arte II (1991) and the gigantic Pilastro Crepadona (1999): a moment in which the artist, having experimented with the monumental scale and the floor-level arrangement of the fifty elements from 1992, returns to explore the theme of support, abruptly reducing it to the dimensions of a table-top object – almost domestic in nature – seventy-four centimetres on each side and barely sixty in height.

The plinth is, by architectural definition, the humblest and yet most essential element of any monument: the base that is almost never seen, but which makes everything above it possible, transferring the weight of the monument to the ground. It is precisely the archetype that Cavenago had already challenged with his ‘columns on wheels’ in Berlin and which he would revisit years later, intervening directly on the plinths of actual monuments such as the Marzocco in Pietrasanta or the lion in Cittadella. Plinto anticipates and condenses that gesture into its most elementary and isolated form: here there is nothing to support – no statue, no lion, no column – there is only the support itself, presented as the sole subject of the work, stripped of what it is meant to bear.

What sets Plinto apart from the rest of the series, however, is the mechanism of destabilisation chosen. Whereas the pillars in Berlin and Belluno rested on wheels – capable, at least in theory, of moving the entire structure elsewhere, of causing it to migrate to a different geographical location – here Cavenago introduces a simple roller beneath it, which does not allow escape but causes it to tilt: the plinth does not slide away; it bends in on itself, losing the horizontal alignment that its very celebratory function would require. It is a subtle yet decisive variation on the series’ overarching theme: no longer the support that flees, but the support that collapses in its very own place, betraying from within—through collapse rather than departure—the task assigned to it.

The material, too, marks a departure from the rest of the body of work: no longer the industrial galvanised sheet metal of the pillars and tiles, but stainless steel and cast aluminium – more precious alloys, almost like a design object or a small collectable sculpture. It is as though, by reducing the scale of the intervention from an urban monument to an interior object, Cavenago had also sought to refine its material register, shifting the reflection on unstable support from the public realm—squares, historic buildings, colonnades—to the more intimate and concentrated space of the studio or the shop window.

Plinto thus demonstrates how, in Cavenago’s work, the theme of the betrayed support runs through every possible scale of his work: from the six-metre colonnade in Berlin to the sixteen-metre pillar of Palazzo Crepadona, right down to this small steel and aluminium plinth which, with nothing above it to support, merely tilts, confessing, in its simple lateral fall, the very same structural and conceptual fragility that the entire series A sostegno dell’Arte has never ceased to bring to the fore.