Fuori squadra, 2000

The title, even before the work itself, already reveals its nature: ‘fuori squadra’ is a technical term used on building sites and in joinery, referring to an element whose angle no longer conforms to the ninety degrees specified in the design – originally a flaw rather than a deliberate choice. Here, Cavenago transforms this defect into a constructive principle.

The work consists of four steel wheels, paired two by two: two distinct pairs, each internally coherent, but with no structural connection between one and the other. This is already a first anomaly compared with the rest of the artist’s work on the theme of the wheel, where the mechanism was usually a single unit: a single axle, a single system of rotation shared by all the elements. Here, however, the internal coupling system within each pair introduces a twist, a torsion that misaligns the whole from the expected perpendicularity: the wheels do not touch the ground with their full surface, but at an angle, edging along, like skis tackling a bend by cutting into the snow at an angle rather than gliding over it flat.

It is a detail that entirely alters the meaning of the object. Whereas in Cavenago’s other wheeled sculptures—the pillars in Berlin, the plinths in Visita guidata, the monochrome hanging on the wall—the wheel always implicitly presupposes a horizontal, smooth, passable surface: the floor of a gallery, the tarmac of a city, the flat surface on which an object can glide without friction. In Fuori squadra, that ideal surface is lost along with the perpendicularity of the wheels themselves: the object does not seem designed for a flat surface, but for rough, uneven terrain, where the only way to move forward is to edge along, tilt, and negotiate bend after bend on ground that offers no guarantee of horizontality.

When asked whether this is a metaphor, the most honest answer is: probably yes, and it works precisely because it is not explicitly stated. All of Cavenago’s research on the theme of support and movement had hitherto presupposed – even when he ironically denied it – the existence of a flat road, a stable surface on which the paradox could be staged. Fuori squadra seems to mark a turning point: here, it is no longer the stability of the ground that is called into question by the wheels, but the very possibility of a stable ground that is ruled out from the outset. The wheels no longer promise a comfortable escape to elsewhere, as in the Berlin pillars or the little ‘pocket’ 4WD: they promise only an adventure on unforgiving terrain, where every step forward requires a constant, unstable adjustment of angle – the very same condition, one might say, of those who still seek a secure foundation after having discovered, in all his previous works, that the foundation has always been an illusion.