Monocromo n. 180, 2010

There comes a point where a painting ceases to be a surface and becomes a body, where colour, rather than spreading across a canvas, is applied to a sheet of metal shaped by a numerically controlled bending machine, yet is still applied by hand, with a brush, in accordance with the oldest and most artisanal gesture of painting. It is at this seemingly contradictory point that Umberto Cavenago’s Monocromo n. 180 (2010) is situated, a work whose very title—a number rather than a name—conveys its dimensions: 180 centimetres, the length of a recumbent human body, of a bar, of an architectural element taken from its context and mounted on the wall. But on closer inspection, at the corners of this element—which appears to be installed like a painting—four turned aluminium wheels appear: a subtle detail, almost concealed by the frontal orientation of the wall-mounted piece, which nevertheless suggests another possibility for the work — that of resting on a horizontal surface and, from there, moving. The monochrome, therefore, is not merely painting made into a body: it is painting made into a vehicle, suspended between the contemplative stillness of the wall and the kinetic potential of the floor.

Cavenago’s training combines technical drawing and sculpture, metalwork and design: his vocabulary typically consists of steel, aluminium and industrial rubber – materials that already carry within them a history of factory production, mass production and function. But here, on this mechanically derived surface, the artist introduces an element of the opposite nature: the acrylic is neither spray paint nor an industrial surface treatment, but rather colour applied by hand, stroke by stroke, with the painter’s brush. It is a deliberate short-circuit: the hand returning precisely where one would expect the anonymity of the machine, and in this discrepancy, in this friction between the geometric rigour of the object and the manual patience of its surface, the work finds its most subtle tension — a tension that the wheels do not resolve, but rather intensify: even motion, like colour, is here promised rather than enacted, potential rather than real.

In this, the work engages in a dialogue — through both proximity and difference — with the genealogy of twentieth-century monochrome, from Malevich to Klein, right up to Manzoni’s ‘Achrome’ series, an artist to whom Cavenago had already dedicated an explicit work in 1999. Like that tradition, Monocromo n. 180 asserts the manual act of painting as the foundation of the monochrome; but unlike it, it does not entrust this to canvas but to a three-dimensional body, six centimetres thick, which is sufficient to assert its belonging to real space, not to the illusory space of representation — and to that form it adds, through its wheels, a further affiliation: that to the world of simple machines, of objects made to move. The painting becomes an object; the object becomes almost a vehicle; the painting, whilst remaining a gesture of the hand, is applied to a structural form rather than a canvas; no longer a canvas hung on the wall, but a painted and rotated sculpture that pretends, with subtle irony, to be a painting, and which, precisely thanks to the manual brushstroke, paradoxically retains its right to be called as such.

It is a gesture that is central to the artist’s entire body of work; he has always been drawn to the short-circuit between machine and monument, between industrial process and craftsmanship deliberately brought to the fore. Like his engine-less vehicles or his sculptures on wheels — Camion, Half Ton, the steel roller skates — this monochrome work, too, belongs to that family of devices that declare one function whilst denying another: it has the structure of an industrial panel, the surface of a hand-painted picture and, at the corners, the wheels of a vehicle that will never travel any road whilst it remains hung on the wall. It is a vehicle immobilised by its very status as a work of art, constrained to the horizontality of the picture whilst bearing upon itself, turned from aluminium, the memory of its vocation for movement.

Monocromo n. 180 is therefore a work about ambiguity: sheet metal that has become a painting surface, a brushstroke that has become the surface of a sculptural object, a wheel that has become a silent detail of a journey never undertaken. In this unresolved – and deliberately unresolvable – oscillation between the painter’s hand, the designer’s calculation and the unfulfilled promise of the means of transport lies the most authentic meaning of Umberto Cavenago’s work.