Pattini a rotelle, 1989

In the late 1980s, Umberto Cavenago produced a series of galvanised sheet metal roller skates, characterised by an industrial and apparently functional design. Each pair, marked with a specific number, has customised dimensions to fit the morphology of the human foot. However, despite their innovative aesthetics, the thin galvanised steel sheet skates are impractical due to their fragility. The shaped sheet metal, however, reflects a focus on proportion and symmetry, creating a unique visual balance. This work embodies the intersection of art and the dynamism of sport or leisure, transforming an object associated with freedom and adventure into a work of art with essential lines and refined simplicity.

[...] Pattini a rotelle is the sheet metal reconstruction of the object mentioned in the title. Made in several examples of various sizes (from 35 to 45), it was not, however, designed and 'produced' to support body weight, as it was only meant to represent the conceptual symbol of a minimal vehicle, an 'anthropomorphic amplifier of speed'. Such, however, was the power of involvement and destabilisation that the work was able to trigger in the public at its first exhibition, that some specimens were destroyed by spontaneous attempts to use them by some visitors.

Luigi Di Corato, 2003

Umberto Cavenago begins to cross the history of art with vehicles (trucks, skates, motorcycles...) equipped with wheels; these wheels guarantee movement but also a consequent instability, the same one that, ironically, in the second phase of his work, gave rise ideally to that `support of art` of the large frames, columns and telescopic beams.
The survey is mainly developed on two tracks: that of form and that of function. The shape is linear, essential, synthetic, and finally softened by the wheels that give it an extraordinary vitality. The function is to ironically overturn the values and priorities so-called `genres`, for example, which, especially in the past, may have been a constraint for a freer interpretation of a world still as mysterious as that of art. Galvanized sheet is the coat of all this, apparently cold. Yet these `vehicles` are enveloped by a captivating energy, by a sort of anthropomorphism subtly functional to the artist's discourse. The series of roller skates is built respecting the real proportions: the number thirty-seven is really the number thirty-seven. Every relationship is always thought out and nothing is left to chance.

In 1989, Cavenago created thirteen pairs of roller skates made from 8/10-millimetre galvanised sheet metal, which were installed shortly afterwards in a group exhibition at Studio Marconi in Milan, spread across the building’s three floors. This marked a significant shift in scale compared to the large, bulky vehicles he had created up to that point: the artist moved from lorries and motorbikes – objects that had occupied entire exhibition spaces – to a small, human-scale object, the skate, constructed in accordance with the actual proportions of the foot (size thirty-seven, as Vittoria Coen observed, is indeed size thirty-seven, with no artistic licence taken regarding scale).

The most radical choice, however, concerns not the form but the placement: the skates are placed strictly on the floor, without any plinth. This decision is consistent with the artist’s entire exploration of the theme of traditional sculptural support, but here it produces a consequence whose full implications Cavenago may not have foreseen. The exhibition audience, accustomed to familiar patterns and the banality of convention, upon seeing the skates resting on the floor – and perhaps recognising their own shoe size, stamped on each pair exactly as on a shoe – does not merely observe them: they step onto them. It is a pity that that thin sheet metal, conceived as a conceptual symbol of a minimal vehicle, an anthropomorphic amplifier of speed – as Luigi Di Corato defined it – was in no way designed to bear actual body weight. The result was the destruction and deformation of several pieces, trampled underfoot by visitors unable to grasp the artefact’s intrinsic fragility and the implicit question that its fragility raised: since when does one step on a work of art?

It is an episode that could simply have been dismissed as an accident, a misunderstanding attributable to the public’s ignorance. But years later, Cavenago undertook a far more interesting project: he transformed that damage into a design element, into working material in every sense. Thus, in 1995, A prova di scemo was born, a title that openly declares, with an almost vindictive irony, the lesson learnt from the 1989 episode. The same life-size scale, the same thirteen pieces numbered from 34 to 46, the same absence of a plinth and the same placement on the ground; but this time the material is no longer the thin 8/10-millimetre galvanised sheet metal, but rather Cor-Ten steel, a durable alloy by definition, capable of truly withstanding the weight of those who, once again, will be unable to resist the temptation to trample on the artwork.

The title itself plays on a double meaning: on the one hand, it acknowledges, with biting sarcasm, that ‘crude’ section of the public who, in 1989, were unable to distinguish a fragile artwork from an everyday object; on the other, it transforms that very lack of respect into a design element to be incorporated from the outset, rather than endured as a setback. As Antonella Soldaini wrote, the perceived void where the skater might have been creates a gap which the observer, having gauged their own scale, cannot help but wish to fill, physically intervening on the artwork and, through that gesture, restoring it to a new form – even if that form is that of its own destruction. With A prova di scemo, Cavenago does not eliminate this dynamic: he embraces it, anticipates it, and makes it structurally sustainable, implicitly thanking that very same public which, by trampling on the first skates, had unwittingly provided him with the missing element needed to complete the work in its final version.