G. B. si innamora della signorina Bene

Having abandoned Expressionism and the realist poetic of the early fifties - when he worked on a rough figurative art drawing widely on popular ideas, using polychrome cement to represent workers from the Lombard countryside and people in the outer suburbs of Milan - at the beginning of the next decade Cavaliere worked on an idea for narrative sculptural episodes. The cycle of "Le avventure di Gustavo B." - including this work in the Civiche Raccolte, acquired in 1984 - has its roots in the grotesque anatomies of the "Metamorfosi" created in the late fifties. Gustavo B. was "an imaginary charcter in which I reflect myself". He is the protagonist of a narrative which verges on both Surrealism and Existentialism, set in a ruined, post-atomic urban landscape, on which Cavaliere worked between 1960 and 1963. Exhibited for the first time in March 1963 at the Galleria Levi, Milan, with a presentation by Emilio Tadini, the cycle was made out of a variety of materials - steel, concrete, glass, wood, lead, brass, porcelain, iron, mirrors - with a constant experimentation that combined an interest in set design with the Dadaist tradition of the object touvé. The cycle follows Gustavo B. in his everyday life, work and leisure, relationships with nature and the city. In "G. B. si innamora della signorina Bene", placed next to the tiny figure, on an inclined iron plane, are two heads and a coat of ceramic, small doors and a Magrittean aplle made of lead which, "in the atmosphere of a metaphysical relic", populate an inner dream, with distorted proportions, where the sculptor faces, ironically, the conbination of romantic love and death. The figure of the beloved is evoked "through the disjecta membra of her mutilated head, face turned upside down and the stump of an arm, in a space with a steep perspective of Metaphysical and de Chirichean origins". [Mariella Milan]