La 74, 2006

Some notes on La 74

The work takes its title from L'alcova d'acciaio, the book that Filippo Tommaso Marinetti dedicates to the last months of his war experience in the First World War. The book also recounts the exploits of the young lieutenant aboard the "74", the armoured self-propelled Lancia-Ansaldo 1ZM with which he threw himself towards the enemy front. Cavenago takes up Marinetti's machinist myth to re-propose La 74 in a symbolic and anti-war key. The new vehicle-alcove with which the artist delivers a reinterpretation of the aesthetic experience of the early Futurism, is a Cor-Ten steel "car armor", created by zeroing all the offensive indications of the inspiring vehicle. Although defused and reduced to a minimal volume, it nevertheless retains an aura of enigmatic aggressiveness: La 74 is a sculpture on wheels, apparently inaccessible, inside which is placed a symbolic alcove consisting of two military-inspired berths.

 Luigi Di Corato

La 74 at Villa d'Este
A sculpture in assembly box

Placed in a precarious position, on the grassy ground of one of the sloping squares in the northern part of the garden, La 74 is a sculpture on wheels made of about sixty pieces of CorTen steel and galvanized steel, bolted to each other. The assembly of the constituent elements is organised according to a scheme, prepared by the artist, which specifies criteria, order and sequences for the recomposition of the entire sculpture.

Nicoletta Cardano

La 74 at Villa d'Este
A sculpture and a novel

The work is presented as a closed, armoured volume, with an interior accessible from a hatch on the rear side, an equipped space where there are two berths and a provision of essential equipment for the assembly and disassembly of the sculptural vehicle (ladder, hoist with guide, tool box, mounting bolts, lifting crick, level, tools for recording and adjusting the alignment of the wheels, etc.).
The vehicle is a sort of volumetric armoured car, equipped with non-steering wheels, static in its metallic mass of three thousand kilos, apparently immovable.
As its name reveals, it derives from a suggestion for the La 74, the car armor of F. T. Marinetti from the novel L'alcòva di acciaio (1921), from which he also takes up the idea of the interior, in an alky and irreverent alcove, of technological furniture. The work has developed from Monocromo bianco, 2005, exhibited at the exhibition La scultura italiana del XX secolo, Fondazione Pomodoro, Milan (2005): an improbable block with wheels, of material declared as stone, but of dubious consistency, painted in oil and hung on the wall as if it were painting on a stone. In La 74, the same volume is rethought as a sheet metal box, according to engineering methods that make possible the implementation of a movement intended as an easier possibility of installation and disassembly, and as a real movement of the sculpture itself on wheels.

Nicoletta Cardano

La 74 at Villa d'Este
A moving sculpture

The reflection on the potentiality of the movement of the sculptural object, in the two senses of the dynamism of the static mass and the motion and transportability, physical and conceptual, of the artistic work, has been the main theme of Cavenago's research from the beginning. After putting geometric volumes in galvanized steel on wheels, between 1988-89, he created Camion e Camion a T, simplified vehicles, always in galvanized sheet metal, the result of a minimization of the original shape, composed of a parallelepiped resting on a horizontal plane and lying on a four-wheeled plinth. A further development is Half Ton (1989), a sculpture made like a gigantic TIR, with large regular wheels and so out of measure that it occupies the interior space of Studio Marconi 17 in Milan. Painted as white as the exhibition hall, it has a movement limited by the relationship of measurement with the space, with which it integrates almost to assimilate itself to an architectural element of the same.

Nicoletta Cardano

La 74 at Villa d'Este
A habitable sculpture

La 74 also has references in the conception of the interior space of the structure, which is at the same time a hidden refuge, maneuvering space and asphyxiated prison with Home Sweet Home, an elementary volume of a house divided longitudinally in half, designed for the open-air sculpture competition to be placed in Rozzano (2004).
Made at the Rebuzzi workshop in Brusaporto (BG), the work on La 74 is complemented by an assembly manual, printed in a limited edition, complete with drawings and a time lapse video covering the dismantling - reassembly operations in the workshop, in the studio and finally in Villa d'Este and conceived as a work in progress accompanying the work in its subsequent handling.

Nicoletta Cardano