The volume, edited by Laura Andreini, is dedicated to the digital exhibition Oro by Fabrizio Plessi, hosted by Rifugio Digitale. Plessi’s artistic research has always revolved around the themes of water and fire rendered through video installations, video sculptures and videotapes. In the 1970s, he was one of the first to use the monitor as the main material and tool for his projects. His works, exhibited in the world’s most important museums, keep alive the dialogue with classicism, creating a link between past and future.
And it is precisely in the tunnel that the artist has exhibited ORO, a site-specific work that starts from the translucent walls with which this space is clad to create a giant mosaic of gold that as it melts moves and breathes “in its subterranean liquidity, resplendent and sumptuous.” The artist has imagined a single large work that almost biologically, can coexist with this anomalous and sensory circular architecture. The nocturnal, luminous reverberation of the work’s gilded surfaces modifies, alters, swells and expands like the waves of an evocative, abstract sea in constant motion.
Fabrizio Plessi is one of the pioneers of the Italian video art, and the first one to have used a television monitor like a real material, within which runs a relentless water and digital fire flow. His numerous participations in Venice Biennale since 1970 or in film festivals and international dance have always made him an artist able to create innovative and anticipative art experimentations. He collaborated with many theatres and televisions. In his projects, the video is completely part of the architecture and the primary elements, whether is it coal, wood, marble, travertine, or iron. At international level he took part to relevant exhibitions, for instance, Documenta di Kassel and important anthological exhibitions in different museums around the world: Guggenheim in New York and Bilbao, Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome, Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, IVAM in Valencia, MoCA in San Diego, Ludwig Museum in Budapest and Koblenz, Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, Kunsthistorisches in Vienna, and Miro’ Foundation in Barcelona. Plessi created particularly impressive and magnificent art pieces. Plessi was also Professor of Humanization of Technologies at Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne, and holder of the chair of Electronic Sceneographies in the same university.
