Plessi in Venice
Venice, the city on the water, is preparing to host Plessi in Venice, a major project devoted entirely to this natural element, as interpreted by Fabrizio Plessi (b. 1940, Reggio Emilia), one of Italy’s most highly acknowledged and esteemed maestros at international level.
Water is actually one of the most characteristic features in this artist’s work, an element that has been guiding many of his creations since 1968, whatever form they take: installations, films, videos and performances. As Plessi himself has had occasion to point out, “water has always been the dominant motif in my life and my artistic and cultural career”.
Plessi in Venice comprises two distinct sections, both curated by Marco Tonelli.
The first is the exhibition Plessi. Liquid Life; the flow of memory. 1000 projects, organised by the Veneto Museum Hub partnering with the Alberto Peruzzo Foundation, with the patronage of EXPO 2015 and of the Italian Pavilion at EXPO 2015, taking place in the Giorgio Franchetti Gallery at Ca’ d’Oro, a highly evocative building and historical landmark on the Grand Canal in Venice.
For the exhibition in the Ca’ d’Oro, Plessi has devised a video installation with screens set into tables that repeat images of an “electronic flow” of water, ideally representing the flow of thoughts and his entire creative life.
The works will have the capacity to trigger highly evocative painterly visions. Says the artist: “I believe that video constitutes a perfect corollary to water: water is a changeable element, ancient, ancestral and primordial, while video is a contemporary element: both are fluid and unstable. Both give off a light blue glow”. The same glow that Plessi has come across in the innovations of Tintoretto and of Titian and which he had ample occasion to study and appreciate while living in the quintessential city of water that is Venice. His tables are like sculptures, but also containers of a thousand drawings that represent the nucleus of his works’ conception and design.
The other event, organised by the Alberto Peruzzo Foundation with the patronage of the Veneto Regional Council and of Venice to Expo 2015 and held on the same dates at the Tesa 94 in the Venice Arsenal, comprises a major installation entitled Plessi. Liquid Light, which for the first time in forty years has not a trace of any monitors or plasma screens, but just a tenuous, mysterious light blue luminescence (reminiscent of the blue glow on a TV screen) that shines out of the keels of fourteen overturned boats, the traditional boats of the Balearic islands, called llaüt, which are used for trawl fishing, to the background accompaniment of the sound of lapping waves.
As a consequence of an EU programme that provided incentives for them to be decommissioned, many fishermen abandoned their llaüt. After a period spent conducting detailed research and recuperation in Mallorca, Fabrizio Plessi decided to give some of these vessels a new lease of life, making them both the content and the container of this installation, a tribute to the Mediterranean.
