Fabrizio Plessi. Plessi in Venice

Venice, the city of water, will host PLESSI IN VENICE, a major project devoted entirely to this natural element and interpreted by Fabrizio Plessi (Reggio Emilia, 1940), one of Italy’s most highly acknowledged and esteemed maestros at international level. 
Water is actually one of the most characteristic features in his works: it is an element that has been guiding many of his creations, whatever form they take being them installations, films, videos or performances, since 1968. 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 one is the exhibition PLESSI. LIQUID LIFE. The flow of memory. 1000 projects, organised by the Veneto Museum Hub partnering with Fondazione Alberto Peruzzo,  with the patronage of EXPO 2015 and of the Italian Pavilion at EXPO 2015, taking place from 6 May to 22 November 2015 in Giorgio Franchetti Gallery at Ca’ d’Oro, a highly evocative building and a historical landmark on the Grand Canal in Venice. 
For the exhibition in Ca’ d’Oro, Plessi has devised a video installation with screens set into tables that broadcast images of an “electronic flow” of water, ideally representing the flow of thoughts of his entire creative life.
The works have the capacity to trigger highly evocative painterly visions. The artist says: “I believe that video constitutes a perfect corollary to water: water is a mutable 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 Titian and which he had the occasion to study and appreciate while living in the quintessential city of water: Venice. His tables are like sculptures, but also containers of a thousand drawings that represent the nucleus of his works’ conception and design.
“If light, pure electricity, is the primordial matter that drives technology,” comments the curator, Marco Tonelli, “then in Plessi drawing is memory, personal experience and imagination that powers another kind of energy, the artist’s own inner élan, with the potential to capture the vibrations of a modernity that one of today’s great sociologists, Zygmunt Bauman, has defined as ‘liquid’.” 

The other event, organised by Fondazione Alberto Peruzzo with the patronage of the Veneto Regional Council and of VENICE TO EXPO 2015 and held on the same dates in Tesa 94 in Venice Arsenal, comprises a major installation entitled PLESSI. LIQUID LIGHT, which for the first time in forty years does not present any trace of 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 Balearic islands' boats, called llaüt, which are used for trawl fishing, and 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 recovery 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. 
The project PLESSI IN VENICE is accompanied by two catalogues published by Peruzzo Editoriale: one devoted specifically to the exhibition in Ca’ d’Oro, the other to the installation in the Arsenal. 

Fabrizio Plessi (Reggio Emilia, 1940) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, where he then also spent many years teaching. Using video as an artistic medium, he mapped out an innovative path for himself that has made him famous all over the world. A co-founder of the Cologne Kunsthochschule für Medien, he has taught Humanisation of Technologies and Electronic Scenography. The Ludwig Museum in Cologne is home to his famous installation Bombay-Bombay. He has taken part in 14 editions of the Venice Biennale, from 1970 to his latest in 2011, when he showed Mari Verticali (Vertical Seas) in the Venice Pavilion. Elsewhere in Italy, he won an award at the Rome Quadriennale in 1999. In the same year, the Kestner Gesellschaft of Hanover presented him with the NLB award as artist of the year. In 2002, he held an anthological entitled Paradiso/Inferno in the Stables of the Quirinale Palace in Rome. He has held more than 500 one-man shows, from the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1982) and the Guggenheim in New York (1998) to the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (1998) and the Guggenheim in Bilbao (2001). In 1987, his celebrated installation Roma took part in the Documenta VIII in Kassel. In 2003, he was in Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau with an anthological. In the same city, he also created a large installation for the Sony Centre in the Potsdammer Platz. In Austria, he worked with the country’s leading museums, such as the Kunsthistoriches Museum, the Museum Ludwig and the Neue Galerie in Linz. Plessi has also been a firm benchmark for up-and-coming countries, with a fine example in the inauguration of the new Rabat Museum of Contemporary Art in 2006. He took part in the Cairo Biennale as invited artist of honour in 2001, as well as the ones in Sharjah, São Paulo and in Gwangju, Korea, in 2000. In 2008, he started working with the Louis Vuitton group, creating art to flank the events in which the famous French maison takes part, such as the America’s Cup. His relationships with industry are close, witness his work with BMW, Dornbracht, Loewe, Swarovski and Calvin Klein. Intellectuals and musicians of the calibre of Robert Wilson, Philip Glass and Michael Nyman have worked with him. The electronic scenography he created for Luciano Pavarotti’s concert in New York’s Central Park in 1993 has gone down in history. Monumenta in Agrigento is his latest grandiose installation, created inside the archaeological park of the Valley of the Temples. On 21 June 2013, the Plessi Museum was inaugurated on the Brenner Pass, home to a permanent exhibition devoted to his art and the first case of a museum space on an Italian motorway. 

PLESSI. LIQUID LIFE
The flow of  memory. 1000 projects
Venice, Giorgio Franchetti Gallery at Ca’ d’Oro (Cannaregio, 3932) 
6 May – 22  November 2015
Opening hours: Monday:8.15 a.m. – 2.00 p.m. | Tuesday - Sunday: 8.15 a.m. – 7.15 p.m.
(the ticket office closes 30 minutes earlier)
Tickets: Full price €10.00;  reduced price €7.00

PLESSI. LIQUID LIGHT
6 May – 22 November 2015
Venice, Tesa 94 di San Cristoforo (Arsenal)
Opening hours: 11.00 a.m. – 7.00 p.m. every day
Tickets: Full price €6.50; reduced prices €5.00

Vai alla guida d'arte di Venice