Spindles – whose gigantic dimensions (10 meters in width and height and 9 in depth) are quite rare in Cecchini’s work – is a modular structure in steel and aluminum that recalls a large tree whose branches form a sort of natural algorithm. Composed of fifty elements, each in turn divided into three paired parts, the sculpture is the result of the artist’s Tuscan experience—lived between Siena, Florence, and Prato—merged with the technological knowledge accumulated during his years in Milan and Berlin. “Spindles is imposing and bold; it symbolizes our ability to react, the strength we draw from resilience,” commented the president of the Cassa di Risparmio di Prato Franco Bini, while the Culture Councillor Simone Mangani emphasized that “this is a project that fits into a long contemporary journey begun fifty years ago with Moore’s Squared Form with Cut [and] in the dialogue between Cecchini’s work and the 14th-century walls, a window to the future opens.” The City Planning Councillor Valerio Barberis added that “art in Prato tells the story of the contemporary city; Spindles is the first piece in the new park, located right at the entrance, marking the beginning of a new narrative for this part of the city.”
The sculpture project proposed for the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Prato formally belongs to one of the artist’s most well-known and appreciated series of works—those modular metal structures that generate ever-changing formal configurations. Their conceptual reference revolves around the ideas of the organic, of growth, of the particulate expansion of matter in a continuous interplay between art, science, nature, and culture.
The sculpture is composed of 50 minimally shaped elements—each divided into 3 paired parts, for a total of 150 partial castings—which resemble large spindles (elements used in the twisting of textile fibers, tied to the city’s historical memory and its main activity in yarn production), interlocked to form a kind of large growth diagram. Within this, concepts such as singular and collective entity, technical and organic, variable and constant become a drawn metaphor for the vectorial and dynamic relationship of the city and its inhabitants in constant evolution, where the singularity of individual elements always relates to a broader context of collective and plural momentum. The sculpture's formal and plastic qualities belong to the technical and technological sphere due to its geometric simplicity and industrial production. At the same time, its rhizomatic branching expands through multiples with the freedom of a plant or an organism, escaping the concept of hierarchy in the absence of a beginning or an end.
