Milan, 1988. Half Ton, a single work exhibited at the Gallery Studio Marconi 17 occupies the entire space.
The sculpture is a vehicle with large wheels and dimensions slightly smaller than the volume of the gallery. Whitewashed as if it were built in masonry, it takes on an architectural aspect and drastically reduces the spaces accessible to the public within the exhibition space.

Assembled within the exhibition space due to its generous size, it occupied almost the entire space that contained it. The metal sheet with which it was constructed was 'whitewashed' and treated as if it were masonry in order to give the work a camouflage effect with respect to the very walls involved. The almost total occupation of the exhibition space left a perimeter path around the work and a more open space near one of the short sides for a frontal view. The work had the possibility of moving within the gallery by compressing the space in front of it, thus evoking a piston-like movement in an ad hoc chamber. The space for the public was managed by the movement of the structure, which drastically expanded or reduced the space available to the public with each movement.

A rigorous ideational methodology and a sophisticated design characterise Umberto Cavenago's work and subtend the realisation of the works for a final result of total essentiality and extreme compositional clarity; in addition, there is a notable attention to the environmental scenario of the work, its harmonic referent, related to it through a system of multiple interactions and in the sign of skilful architectural references, tending towards uniqueness. These connotations are then enriched with further senses: a dialectic of contradictions manifested through a vein of irony, almost a privileged trope of thought, and the alternation of questions and ambiguous answers, all pervaded by a thread of subtle comedy. Works rendered by the artist in sheet metal, a non-noble material, a mirror of our present, of banal and everyday existence, transformed into galvanised or painted structures, in shades of grey or white, pleasant to the touch and to the eye, with no more functionality or memory of use, if not solely that of formal and aesthetic enjoyment. Apparently awkward and heavy works, metal encumbrances all equipped with wheels, sometimes with the potential to move: but immovable and in perfect stillness; vehicle-machines, strange fantasies or mimesis of the real such as Equestrian (1988) or Half Ton (1989) or even Enduro (1989) up to Voglia di treno (1989), crystallising their stasis: metaphorically vehicles of ideas, allegorical and allusive pretexts about play, art, time and space.