In the late 1980s, Umberto Cavenago produced a series of galvanised sheet metal roller skates, characterised by an industrial and apparently functional design. Each pair, marked with a specific number, has customised dimensions to fit the morphology of the human foot. However, despite their innovative aesthetics, the thin galvanised steel sheet skates are impractical due to their fragility. The shaped sheet metal, however, reflects a focus on proportion and symmetry, creating a unique visual balance. This work embodies the intersection of art and the dynamism of sport or leisure, transforming an object associated with freedom and adventure into a work of art with essential lines and refined simplicity.

[...] Roller skates is the sheet metal reconstruction of the object mentioned in the title. Made in several examples of various sizes (from 35 to 45), it was not, however, designed and 'produced' to support body weight, as it was only meant to represent the conceptual symbol of a minimal vehicle, an 'anthropomorphic amplifier of speed'. Such, however, was the power of involvement and destabilisation that the work was able to trigger in the public at its first exhibition, that some specimens were destroyed by spontaneous attempts to use them by some visitors.

Luigi Di Corato, 2003

Umberto Cavenago begins to cross the history of art with vehicles (trucks, skates, motorcycles...) equipped with wheels; these wheels guarantee movement but also a consequent instability, the same one that, ironically, in the second phase of his work, gave rise ideally to that "support of art" of the large frames, columns and telescopic beams.
The survey is mainly developed on two tracks: that of form and that of function. The shape is linear, essential, synthetic, and finally softened by the wheels that give it an extraordinary vitality. The function is to ironically overturn the values and priorities so-called "genres", for example, which, especially in the past, may have been a constraint for a freer interpretation of a world still as mysterious as that of art. Galvanized sheet is the coat of all this, apparently cold. Yet these "vehicles" are enveloped by a captivating energy, by a sort of anthropomorphism subtly functional to the artist's discourse. The series of roller skates is built respecting the real proportions: the number thirty-seven is really the number thirty-seven. Every relationship is always thought out and nothing is left to chance.