Ipotenusa, 2008

Ipotenusa is made up of three black steel elements, treated solely with beeswax – no paint, no industrial coating – but with a matt, almost organic finish that absorbs light rather than reflecting it. Each element rests on the floor at one end and leans against the wall at the other, held in balance by small rollers concealed at both points of contact: a mechanism that allows them to slide, enabling them to glide along the wall and be repositioned, as if the sculpture were never permanently fixed but always adjustable.

The three elements are constructed on a scale relative to one another; they are not identical but proportionally related, so that they can ‘live a life of their own’ whilst remaining in mutual relation, like variations on the same geometric principle repeated on different scales. Each one, resting obliquely between the floor and the wall, casts a shadow that the light traces on the wall: two segments meeting at a right angle – the two immaterial ‘cathetus’ – generated not by the steel but by the light that the steel intercepts. The third side, the hypotenuse that gives the work its title, is, on the other hand, the only physical, tangible element made of metal: the slanted bar connecting the two points of support.

The right-angled triangle is thus completed only in the encounter between what is real and what is projected: two virtual shadow legs, which change with the time of day and the intensity of the light, and a steel hypotenuse, stable and constant. This geometric figure – one of the most elementary and fundamental in Western thought, a theorem underpinning the measurement of space ever since Pythagoras – is presented here not as a drawn abstraction, but as an event occurring within the real space of the room, dependent on light, the vantage point, and the position of each element along the wall.

In this, Ipotenusa condenses, in an almost didactic manner, a recurring theme in Cavenago’s work: the relationship between design and realisation, between geometric calculation and its physical manifestation. The work functions as a device for measuring reality, much like a theodolite or a set square, but it reverses the relationship: it is not the instrument that measures space, but space itself, through light and shadow, that completes the figure which the instrument-sculpture can only partially articulate. The theorem, in other words, proves itself every time light passes through it.