Spindles —whose gigantic dimensions (10 meters in base and height and 9 meters in depth) are quite rare in Cecchini’s work—is a modular structure made of steel and aluminum that resembles 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 memories of his time in Tuscany—spent between Siena, Florence, and Prato—fused with the technological expertise he accumulated during his years in Milan and Berlin. “Spindles is imposing and powerful; it is a symbol of our ability to react, of the strength that comes from resilience,"commented Franco Bini, president of the Cassa di Risparmio di Prato, while Culture Councilor Simone Mangani emphasized that“this project is part of a long journey into contemporary art that began fifty years ago with Moore’s ‘Forma Squadrata con taglio’ [and] the dialogue between Cecchini’s work and the 14th-century walls opens a window onto the future." Valerio Barberis, Councilor for Urban Planning,emphasized that“art in Prato tells the story of the contemporary city; ‘Spindles’ is the first work in the new park, located right at the entrance, with which we begin to write a new narrative for this part of the city."
The sculpture project proposed for the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Prato formally belongs to the artist’s best-known and most highly regarded series of works—namely, those modular metal structures that give rise to ever-changing formal configurations, whose conceptual framework revolves around the ideas of organic form, growth, and the particulate expansion of matter in a continuous interplay between art, science, nature, and culture.
The sculpture consists of 50 minimalist elements —which are in turn divided into 3 paired parts for a total of 150 partial castings—that resemble large spindles (devices used to twist textile fibers, linked to the city’s historical memory and its primary industry of yarn production) interlocked with one another to form a sort of grand growth diagram in which concepts such as the singular and the collective, the technical and the organic, the variable and the constant, become a visual metaphor for the vectorial and dynamic relationship between the city and its inhabitants in a state of continuous becoming, where the singularity of individual elements is always related to a broader context of collective and pluralistic experience. The formal and plastic qualities through which the sculpture is expressed belong to the technical and technological sphere due to its geometric characteristics. The formal and sculptural qualities through which the sculpture is expressed belong to the technical and technological sphere due to its characteristics of simple geometry and industrial design; at the same time, the rhizomatic branches propagate in multiples with the freedom of a plant or an organism, eluding the concept of hierarchy in the absence of a starting point and an endpoint.
