CHP1, 2006

The drawing CHP1 (pastel and acrylic on paper, 150 × 230 cm) precedes the finished sculpture in stainless steel and aluminium (115 × 200 × 22 cm) by a few stages, and belongs to the same category already encountered with C-DUU: not a quick sketch to capture a nascent idea, but a 1:1 scale drawing, produced even before the actual technical working drawings. The dimensions of the sheet are not random: they correspond, point for point, to those the sculpture will have once it has been cut and assembled in the workshop.

It is the same intermediate stage in Cavenago’s creative process, which recurs identically years after C-DUU: after the phase of intuition, when the form of the enduro motorbike begins to take shape in the artist’s mind, and before the purely technical phase, when that form must be translated into dimensions, tolerances and cutting instructions for the laser, there is this full-scale stage, where pastels and acrylics are used to verify how the bike’s more intricate and sinuous lines – the complexity of the design that distinguishes CHP1 from his previous vehicle designs – actually behave when measured at their true size.

In other words, the drawing does not yet describe the sculpture: it puts it to the test. Only after this dimensional verification, after checking that the motorcycle’s recognisable silhouette—even when stripped of all practical function—retains its visual balance even at life-size, can the project proceed to the actual working drawings, the impersonal, technical drawings intended for the workshop, for those who will have to bend the stainless steel and assemble the aluminium in accordance with the synthesis of engineering and aesthetics that characterises the finished work.

Viewed in sequence, the two works thus illustrate a precise and recurring sequence in Cavenago’s method: from the conceptual sketch, to the 1:1 scale study as a check on proportions, right through to the production drawing—a process in which pastels and acrylics, materials that remain entirely painterly, serve not to represent the dream motorbike, but to measure it, before the steel renders it real and, at the same time, definitively immobile.