Contenitore (con linea di fuoco e corna di renna), 1985

The work is a rectangular prism with a square base, as tall as a person, constructed entirely from wooden slats. One of the four vertical sides consists of two panels, which are also framed. It is a box, but a box that makes no secret of its nature: the wooden framework remains exposed, and its structure is that of a painter’s stretcher, which is instantly recognisable.

This detail is not incidental; it is the very foundation of the work. Each side is a frame; instead of canvas, however, there is a sheet of lead, nailed down with the same small nails and in the same regular pattern used to fix canvas to wood. The pattern of nails running along all the edges is that of a painting. Cavenago takes the apparatus of painting, multiplies it by four to create a three-dimensional form, and stretches over it a material as far removed from canvas as possible: opaque rather than receptive, extremely heavy rather than light, impervious to light rather than serving as its reflective surface. Lead, a material with a protective function towards whatever it covers, envelops the structure and reveals it only in part. What in painting is a support here becomes a screen; what was intended to receive an image is now intended to prevent one.

The two doors can be opened, closed or left ajar: and in this configuration, they are ajar. Through that unbroken vertical slit, one can see the one thing that the casing is unable to contain. Inside runs a nichrome wire brought to incandescence, a line of glowing metal that extends the full height of the structure, illuminating and at the same time heating the lead-lined structure, and casting a trail of warm light onto the floor.

The container, therefore, contains precisely a sign of fire: not the flame itself, but its manifestation. And it contains it by reversible choice, because the position of the doors is a parameter of the work and not a fixed feature. Whether open, closed or ajar, the box conveys something different each time about the relationship between what it holds and the viewer; here it conveys the most tense of the three, because it reveals enough to leave no doubt as to what is inside, yet not enough to allow one to verify it.

There is also a fact that no formal description can circumvent: an electric current runs through the wire; the resistance that lights it up produces real heat; and the work is dangerous. Not metaphorically. Anyone who approaches it senses this with their skin before their eyes, and stops. The sculpture thus establishes its own safety perimeter, a distance dictated not by museum convention but by physics: it is the artwork itself that determines how close one can get, and this is the first time in Cavenago’s work that heat acts as a sculptural material in its own right, capable of shaping the space around it.

At the top stands a platform made of reindeer antlers. The branches extend well beyond the width of the structure supporting them, and the wall behind them catches their shadow, doubling its effect. The measured and constructed orthogonality of the parallelepiped is countered by a geometry that has grown organically, irregular and unplanned. The antlers function as an antenna stretched between earth, fire and sky: they receive and transmit, and connect the three elements that the work holds together – the ground on which the box rests, the incandescence it contains, and the space open upwards.

From this juxtaposition arises the dual nature of the artefact. It is both animal and industrial at the same time: the horns are an organic remnant, a reminder of the animal, of nature, of the elements; the lead, the nailed-down wood, the resistive cable and the transformer belong to the vocabulary of the factory and the plant. One does not soften the other, and there is no synthesis: they coexist within the same object, making it a hybrid form, halfway between a totem and a device.

The point where the two natures meet is the power supply. This sculpture lives as long as it is plugged in. Its warmth, its light, its very danger depend on a plug – that is, on a specific historical condition: the ubiquity of electricity, a given of civilisation. It is a provisional existence, hanging on the contingencies of the present, and the contrast with the antlered canopy that surmounts it – a reminder of a nature that needs no power supply – could not be more stark. The reindeer above, the electricity grid within: between the two, a lead casing that protects, warms and keeps things at a distance.