Gregorio, 1988

`One morning, when Gregorio Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked. `What's happened to me?` he thought. It wasn't a dream. His room, a proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls. A collection of textile samples lay spread out on the table - Samsa was a travelling salesman - and above it there hung a picture that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and housed in a nice, gilded frame. It showed a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer. Gregor then turned to look out the window.`

The sheet belongs to the same series of small design sketches from 1988, in the same format and using the same technique of oil pastel and acrylic on card, with which Cavenago captured, that year, the initial ideas that would give rise to his sculptural vehicles. But here the design already contains, within the drawing itself, an anomaly that sets it radically apart from the other vehicles conceived during the same period: the wheels do not touch the ground. They point upwards, as if the vehicle were already overturned onto its back – not a vehicle ready to move, but one captured at the very moment of its fall, or rather, conceived from the outset in that state.

It is an overturning that takes the logic of destabilisation—which characterises the rest of Cavenago’s work—to its extreme conclusion. Whereas elsewhere – in the pillars of A sostegno dell’Arte and in the monuments rendered mobile – the wheel served to undermine the stability of that which claimed to be stationary and solid, here the act is already complete from the outset: there is no longer any need to upset a balance, because the object is born already overturned, already deprived of its primary function. Not a vehicle threatening to overturn, but a vehicle that exists solely in the state of overturning, incapable by its very nature of righting itself and resuming its journey.

This interpretation is reinforced by a second, by no means minor detail: unlike the boxy, geometrically rigorous vehicles produced in those same years—the lorries and motorbikes reduced to clean, angular volumes—here the form is curved, not angular. And it is precisely this curvature that renders the object – were it actually built – incapable of remaining stationary in its overturned position: unable to rest on a flat base, the whole structure would inevitably rock and sway unsteadily upon itself, never finding a point of rest.

It is difficult not to see in this involuntary rocking a precise echo of the Kafkaesque scene evoked by the title: Gregor Samsa waking up on his back, unable to get up, his legs flailing in the air without finding a foothold. Cavenago’s small, overturned vehicle seems to translate precisely that condition into sculptural form – not the fall as a sudden event, but as a permanent and irremediable state, an object swaying on its curved back, never able to return to its wheels, just as Gregor, on the opening page of the story, is unable to right himself and remains suspended in that moment of helplessness.