Home, 1988

There is something surprising about finding, on a small sheet measuring just twenty-one by fifteen centimetres, drawn in oil pastel and acrylic in 1988, the same year as the first ‘Gru’ works and the first wheeled vehicles exhibited at the Franz Paludetto Gallery, a title that anticipates by more than thirty years a theme the artist would only fully develop much later: ‘Home’. Not a design for a house in the architectural sense, but the announcement – still formless and on paper – of an obsession that would recur repeatedly throughout his career, always filtered through his characteristic industrial language.

The drawing remains an unrealised project: we do not know – and perhaps it is not even relevant to know exactly – what three-dimensional form it was intended to take. What matters, looking at it decades later, is its function as a seed, a small note that captures an intention, just as the design drawings for Visita guidata or C-DUU captured the idea before its technical realisation, but which here, unlike in those cases, does not lead to an immediate follow-up. The idea of Home remains suspended, not realised in the workshop, not tested on a 1:1 scale – a thought left to mature, almost dormant, for many years.

It is only decades later that this title, and the theme it embodies, reappear in Cavenago’s work, in different but recognisably related forms. L’Alcova d’acciaio (L'alcova d'acciaio), a habitable sculpture, translates the idea of home into a refuge built with the same material coldness as the steel the artist uses for his sculptures on wheels – a domesticity conceived through the language of the building site, not that of the traditional hearth. Home Sweet Home, a project for a monument, bears the almost identical title from 1988, enriched by the idiomatic expression which, in English, has always accompanied the idea of home as an emotional refuge, but applied – not by chance – to the unsettling language of the monument, a genre that Cavenago has always treated with critical suspicion. And finally, more recently, ‘Sweet Home’, the large Corten steel sculpture installed in the floodplain of the River Po at Suzzara – a hybrid between a house and a boat, moored with ship’s chains and capable of moving in response to the river’s flooding – brings to fruition, perhaps in its fullest form, the idea of a dwelling that is never truly stable, never truly rooted, always exposed to the movement and instability of its surrounding context.

Viewed today, the small ‘Home’ of 1988 thus appears as the starting point of a constellation that would unfold over the course of the artist’s entire career: a title jotted down on a piece of card long before Cavenago possessed the tools, the mature sculptural language and perhaps even the institutional opportunities to fully develop the theme of the house as an unstable, industrial object, never entirely sedentary. Not an aborted project, but an intuition deliberately left in limbo, to which the artist would return, with almost geological patience, at different and distant moments in his artistic exploration.