14. Reversibility

Sculpture is the art of giving form to an object starting from a raw material.

In the case of the traditional marble block, one subtracts, carving or removing material with a suitable tool. With drills, chisels and hammers the material is taken away little by little, until the figure emerges. It was Michelangelo’s favourite technique.

Carving away has a property that is never discussed, because it seems obvious. It is definitive.

What has been removed does not come back. Each blow narrows the set of forms still possible, and sculpture proceeds by successive exclusions until only one figure remains. Skill consists in not making mistakes, because there is no way of putting back.

Can the process of sculpture be retraced backwards?

Can the creation of form, once it has taken place, be reversed by returning the block to its initial conditions?

Erratico reversibile answers yes, and it does so by changing just one thing.

Sixty centimetres per side, Cor-Ten steel, and magnets. The magnets are the answer. They hold the parts together without joining them: there is no welding, no glue, no screw. The force that keeps the solid standing is the same one that allows it to be dismantled. Cohesion and dissolution are not two opposite moments; they are the same property seen in two directions.

The boulder can be built, undone, rebuilt differently.

There is no longer a blow that must not miss. And this, which seems a technical freedom, is in fact a statement about the nature of stone.

For not even a real boulder is forever. A block holds as long as it holds. The surfaces along which it may break already exist within it, invisible, long before it breaks: the fracture is not an accident that supervenes, it is a property that was there and that waits. Time adds nothing; it merely makes visible what was already written in the mass.

Erratico reversibile takes those surfaces and designs them. The planes along which the solid separates are no longer left to the structure of the material and to ten thousand years of frost: they are decided, and the moment they act is at the disposal of whoever touches it. The result is an object with a quality that sculptures have never had.

It is not finished.

Each of its states is as provisional as the one before. There is no definitive version to preserve, nor an original to distinguish from those that follow: there is a set of parts and the configurations they allow.

One last consequence remains, and it opens what follows.

A form that can be dismantled is a form that can be transported.

And something that is transported must, sooner or later, be put somewhere.

Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago