4WD - quattro corone norvegesi, 2011

Seven years have passed between 4WD – quattro corone norvegesi (2011) and 4WD – venti corone danesi (2018), but the core concept remains identical, almost obstinate: four real coins, legal tender, transformed into the wheels of a tiny steel vehicle, small enough to fit in a wallet. Not an isolated work, then, but the start of a series that Cavenago revisits over time, changing the currency and construction method, whilst keeping intact the ironic gesture that gives both their title: 4WD, four-wheel drive, the abbreviation for automotive all-wheel drive, reinterpreted as money’s all-wheel drive over human life.

The difference between the two versions is not decorative but structural, and as such it illustrates a precise evolution in the artist’s thinking. In the 2011 version, the Norwegian kroner function as wheels in the most literal sense: metal discs mounted on an axle, following the most basic mechanical logic. In the 2018 version, however, Cavenago chooses the twenty Danish kroner precisely because, unlike many other currencies, they have a hole in the centre: a numismatic detail that becomes a design opportunity. The hole allows for a different method of assembly, relying on magnets rather than a simple through-pin: the wheels are no longer mechanically fitted, but held in place by an invisible force field, which nevertheless allows them to turn freely. It is a qualitative leap in the object’s poetics: from physical constraint to magnetic constraint, from mechanical traction to an almost immaterial traction – yet another irony, yet another consistency with the theme, because even money, after all, exerts its ‘traction’ on lives without visible ties, through attraction rather than coercion.

The hole in the Danish coin, moreover, is not merely a technical device: it is in itself a powerful image, which the sculpture exploits to the full. A hole at the centre of value—literally at the centre of the material symbol of wealth—becomes a point of passage, a place through which to thread an axis, a relationship, a bond. In the first version, the coin is a solid wheel, a compact disc; in the second, it is a perforated wheel, almost a cog, a ring that lends itself to being passed through. Money, in other words, ceases to be merely an object of intrinsic value and also becomes a relational structure, a connecting element of the small mechanism.

Placed side by side, the two works form a sort of miniature atlas of European currencies reinterpreted as mechanical components: the Norwegian krone and the Danish krone, two coins that share the same root, ‘corona’, in their names, but which, in Cavenago’s sculptural treatment, differ in the way they ‘drive’ the small vehicle. It is an open-ended series, potentially as infinite as the currencies in circulation around the world, each of which could, in principle, provide four new drive wheels for this tiny, pocket-sized off-roader of capital.