Pilastro Crepadona, 1999

A pillar with a capital at its upper end crosses the entire Palazzo Crepadona, the venue of the exhibition curated by Renato Barilli. The temporary installation, made of steel and wood, is oriented diagonally to the columns of the loggia on the ground floor and breaks the architectural scheme with its dysfunctional presence.

On the threshold of the year 2000.
Art in Italy in the 1990s
Belluno–Cortina d’Ampezzo
7 August–26 September 1999
curated by Renato Barilli

Pilastro Crepadona, 1999. Created for the exhibition Alle soglie del Duemila. Arte in Italia negli anni '90, Belluno–Cortina d’Ampezzo, curated by Renato Barilli (7 August – 26 September 1999). The work no longer exists.

Pilastro Crepadona takes the theme of unstable support – a recurring motif throughout Cavenago’s work – to its physical extreme. Sixteen metres high: a pillar, complete with a capital at the top like a true classical architectural element, which does not merely occupy a room but physically traverses Palazzo Crepadona, the venue for the exhibition, starting from the cloister and rising fictitiously through two floors of the building. It is not an object placed within an exhibition space, but a piece of architecture that interlocks with the building’s actual architecture, pierces through it, and challenges its inter-floor layout.

Made of wood, with only the capital and the structural details in steel, the pillar rests at its base on four solid steel wheels: a detail which, given its modest size compared to the sheer scale of the work, might appear marginal, yet which in fact overturns its meaning. A sixteen-metre pillar, which in appearance seems capable of supporting the weight of an entire structure, is rendered – in intention, if not in practice – mobile, movable, temporary: the very same ambiguity between monumentality and instability that Cavenago had already explored in his 1991 pillars in Berlin, here taken to an even more extreme scale and, for the first time, situated not in a neutral exhibition space but within a genuine historic building, whose structural integrity and symmetry it openly contradicts.

The installation, in fact, does not align with the columns of the building’s ground-floor loggia, but cuts across them diagonally, oriented along an east–west axis that recurs frequently in the artist’s work — the same axis that had, eight years earlier, the Berlin colonnade in A sostegno dell'Arte II. It is a deliberate act of disruption: where the historic architecture of the Crepadona demands symmetry, alignment and respect for the original structural axes, Cavenago introduces an element that traverses the space according to its own autonomous geometry, indifferent to—indeed, openly dysfunctional in relation to—the pre-existing order.

Pilastro Crepadona is therefore a piece of architecture within architecture that does not engage in dialogue with the building that houses it, but rather forces its hand: a gigantic support, clearly fictitious in its structural function, positioned obliquely against the logic of the site, and rendered, with its four black steel wheels, potentially capable of leaving, of abandoning that imposed axis to embark on one of its own, once again in an east-west direction, once again in keeping with the most recognisable hallmark of Cavenago’s entire exploration of the subversion of foundations.

L.B., 2018