The travelling mountain

There is a constant tension in Umberto Cavenago’s sculpture, almost a question his work has never stopped asking: can a heavy body, made to stand still, contain within itself the possibility of moving? Since the late 1980s his research has moved along this ridge, between mass and displacement, between the gravity sculpture has inherited from history and the dynamism that belongs to the world of the machine. With Half Ton (1988) the vehicle is not represented but taken on as structure and condition. The wheel does not decorate the volume; it refounds it, turning the sculptural object into a body ready to set off. In L’Arte stanca (1993) and Anello (1994) the ball bearing appears, the minimal and precise organ of mechanical movement. Around these works a repertoire of devices takes shape (eccentrics, cams, telescopic supports) that do not produce movement but hold it back, store it, leave it suspended. Movement thus remains in a potential state, as latent energy.

The same process affects the monument and its foundation. With A sostegno dell’Arte, taken up from 1988 to 2018, the pedestal and the column lose their function as guarantee and become object, problem, instability. When the gaze shifts to the historical monument, Cavenago’s intervention works by superfetation. He grafts onto the commemorative body foreign, mechanical, mobile elements that crack its fixity and unsettle its authority. The monument, made to endure motionless, discovers itself exposed to movement and to the precariousness of public space. What emerges is a practice that does not accept sculpture as a definitive presence, but understands it as a provisional state of matter, a moment in a journey.

Souvenir di montagna arises within this trajectory and is today one of its densest outcomes. Its origin is affective: Cavenago’s love for Alpine passes and for the mountains as a whole. But the pass is not a landscape to be contemplated; it is a place of crossing. It is the point where the vehicle meets the rock and where human mobility measures itself against the resistance of the earth. For an artist who has built his grammar on axles, wheels and trajectories, the pass is the place where the journey becomes form.

The gaze upon the mountain is, after all, a recent achievement. For centuries the mountain was the threshold of the unknown, a space of darkness and danger, to be crossed without stopping. It is with the Enlightenment that it opens up to knowledge. Geologists question its strata and origins, cartographers fix its heights, profiles and ridgelines. In the same decades the borders between nations become sharper, and the mountain becomes both scientific matter and political frontier. At the end of the eighteenth century, the fear of the unknown overcome, the painter climbs alongside the scientist. Caspar Wolf, companion on the expeditions into the Bernese Alps, renders glaciers, gorges and waterfalls with an almost documentary precision. Yet within that precision works the Romantic passion for the dreadful and the terrible, for what towers over man and exposes him to his limits. Measure and dismay, analysis and the sublime coexist without cancelling each other out. The Niesen, an almost perfect pyramid overlooking Lake Thun, becomes its emblem. Ferdinand Hodler paints it several times, until he reduces it to pure volume, a triangle against the sky, as if the mountain, by dint of being looked at, revealed its own geometric structure.

Cavenago does not reach the mountain through the view. Although he once wished to paint, he is first and foremost a sculptor and brings with him a culture of design: the module, the measure, the construction. The mountain cannot be represented head-on. It can only be approached through a mediation, and that mediation is rooted in the questions that run through all his work: what moves, what remains, according to which time. For the mountain, the absolute image of stability, does move. Over geological time it rises, folds, breaks and slides down into the valley. Between human time and the time of the earth opens a dizzying gap, and it is the same gap his sculptures on wheels have staged for decades: movement exists even when it escapes perception.

The mediation then passes through the pieces of mountain, the fragments that have travelled all the way down to the plain. For someone who grew up in a city on the plain, where the mountain is a distant line on clear days, and who later chose to live at its feet, those fragments are the sign of a shared journey, made in the opposite direction. The synthesis of this encounter is the erratic boulder, a block torn from its place and carried by the glacier for dozens of kilometres, until it comes to rest in a territory that does not belong to it. The glacier was its vehicle, slow, relentless, without wheels. The erratic boulder is a mountain on the move: an enormous weight that has known displacement and carries inscribed, in its strangeness to the place, the memory of movement. In it Cavenago’s research finds the figure it had always pursued.

Since 2018 the Erratici series has explored this figure across materials and scales. It moves from the precision of 3D printing to the oxidised roughness of Cor-Ten, and on to the resinous warmth of Swiss stone pine. The series even reaches the minimal scale of jewellery, where white gold holds a magnet like a secret force. At the heart of it all, however, lies a paradox. The boulder is by definition the product of chance: it is born of a fracture no one decided, shaped by frost and friction, deposited where the glacier retreated. No form is further from intention. Designing a boulder therefore means entering a logical short circuit, for one claims to foresee what by its very nature escapes all foresight. Cavenago does not sidestep this contradiction; he adopts it as a method. He starts from the hexahedron, the Platonic cube, solid of reason and measure, which his work has questioned for decades. It is the form itself that dictates the operating score: the cube has eight vertices, so there will be eight truncations. The number is not chosen; it is given. But where and how each vertex will be cut is not established in advance: chance decides, in the very moment of the gesture. The design no longer draws the form; it draws the conditions for chance to act. The result is an irregular fourteen-faced polyhedron that reason has generated without being able to foresee it. And since chance cannot be repeated, every performance of the same score produces a different outcome: the rule remains identical, the result is always unique. Abstraction thus arrives not at the boulder as idea or archetype, but at a boulder, any one, one among the many that dot the meadows and woods of the valleys. In this gap the design recognises its own limit and turns it into form. Chance becomes the share of nature that the design agrees to take in.

With Souvenir di montagna this research enters public space and takes on the scale of the body. The polyhedron opens: one of its fourteen faces is missing and the boulder, emptied of its mass, becomes inhabitable. You enter, you linger, you look at the landscape through slits that recall the fortifications with which Switzerland has guarded its passes and borders, a theme already present in Protecziun da la patria. And yet the boulder remains a polyhedron ready to roll, a suspended movement, the same tension of the vehicles and unstable pedestals now transferred into the form of the rock. From the playground of Molino Nuovo in Lugano to the Maloja Pass, the two permanent works bring the project back to the mountain pass from which it set out.

The pages that follow cross this project, still in progress, in five movements. The invention of the boulder shows how, in Alpine culture, the boulder has repeatedly been reconstructed rather than observed: painted on the façade of a town hall, raised as a monument, simulated in the concrete of bunkers. Building the erratic enters the method: from the hexahedron to the stone, the measure of the calibre, the difference that arises from repetition. Inhabiting the boulder considers the work as a shelter, between slits, inside and outside, reversibility. Topographies follows the places, from an erratic boulder moved in Aargau to Molino Nuovo and the Maloja. Genealogies goes back to the forms that preceded this research, from the polyhedron of Dürer’s Melencolia to Giacometti’s Kubus. A coda, Forms that migrate, closes the journey, only provisionally.

The souvenir, the object one brings home from a journey, is here turned upside down. It is not the visitor who takes away a fragment of mountain: it is the mountain that has come down, travelled, and waits for him. Recognising it, inhabiting it for an instant and setting off again is the gesture the work asks for.

Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago