A sostegno dell'Arte, 1988

The 1988 drawing A sostegno dell'Arte, a small pencil sketch on paper measuring just 18 × 18 centimetres, embodies an ambition that the young Cavenago would never realise: a project conceived to span the three floors of Studio Marconi in Milan, one of the most influential galleries for Italian art of that era. It was an idea that emerged fully formed in its conceptual radicalism – the work as a structure that pierces through the building rather than simply occupying a room – but which the gallery deemed, at the time, to be unsustainable in economic and commercial terms: too ambitious, too costly, and not marketable enough for an artist still at the very beginning of his career. The project thus remained on paper, a testament to how, right from the outset, Cavenago was prepared to propose bold and uncompromising solutions, resistant from the very start to any logic of adapting to the market.

That idea, however, did not disappear: it lay dormant for over a decade, until it finally found, in 1999, a context willing to embrace it in its entirety. It was Pilastro Crepadona, created for the exhibition curated by Renato Barilli at Palazzo Crepadona, that literally gave form to that youthful design which had remained unimplemented: an architectural element that physically spans two floors of the building, starting from the cloister, precisely in accordance with the multi-storey concept that Studio Marconi had deemed impracticable eleven years earlier. The city, the gallery and the scale of the project have changed – from Milan to Belluno, from a private commercial space to a critically curated museum exhibition – but the principle remains the same: a single fictitious architecture that becomes a vertical passageway through a real building, in open contradiction to its original layout and symmetry.

Viewed within this continuity, Pilastro Crepadona is not merely yet another variation on the theme of the unstable support that runs through Cavenago’s entire body of work: it is also, and perhaps above all, belated justice done to a 1988 intuition that was too radical for its time – a project that the market had rejected in the name of sustainability, and which the art world, eleven years later, was finally able to support.