Fabrizio Plessi Video Going

© PHOTO MOLTENI & MOTTA
VIDEO GOING 1985

Fabrizio Plessi: the man of liquid time

Before handing itself over to the simultaneous guidance of Renato Barilli and Flavio Caroli, the Rotonda di via Besana in Milan concluded its autonomous programme with an exceptional and in some ways unrepeatable event: the exhibition of «Video Going» by Fabrizio Plessi. The extraordinarily spectacular itinerary-show illustrates and embodies the entire work of this artist, dedicated to a keystone of liquid time.
«Living, surveying the surface of water and that of the video has been my almost daily work systematically developed foe a decade».
Water and video have in fact been the obsessive constants in Plessi ’s work, in a sequence of operations involving the most diverse media, from high technology communication to materials in the most ordinary usage. Plessi is the man-orchestra of an existential adventure geared to two essential factors: water as a fundamental symbol-element. An time as the universal projection of the artist’s consciousness.
From this apparent clash, Plessi has managed to draw the definitive elements of a language of synthesis. Plessi’s art is a vital art, the perhaps complex and highly picturesque expression of a simple need, of a faith in a direct vision of the elementary manifestation of energy. Giving a liquid dimension to time corresponds to the sensation of universal fluidity of the perceptive fact and of communication between beings capable of assuming the unlimited flexibility of existential duration.
Plessi’s art is a kind of prayer or ritual activity, the ritual of our modernity vis-à-vis the immemorial problems of being, and of the sea. The sea as a perceptive infinity, as for others the sky my be. The air of the sky becomes the sea wind and the clouds waves.
Those who visited the Rotonda di via Besana will remember the high spots of this symphony of liquid time, the mobile glass in Waterwind, the circular battery of Video Going with its water-fall of stones, and most of all, the bewitching Mare di Marmo (Sea of Marble), the mineral field of television sets depicting a blue sea, half-buried among sheets of marble. Emotions, noises, colours and air flows: the whole gamut of perception created a syncopated harmony of moments of fecund anarchy.
Beyond pure aesthetic enjoyment, the exhibition, which took the form of a synthetic vocabulary, the lexicological structure of Plessian language. A lifetime of work beneath the cupola of Milans,s Lazzaretto. The Rotonda di via Besana was officially opened to the public after municipal resolution in 1970, with the historic «Noveaux Réalistes» exhibition. The Plessi show has marked another big moment in the Rotonda history. The artist hoped that the public would identify the place with the blue of the video, so as to give him the secret pleasure, each day, of mixing them and confusing them.

Pierre Restany (Domus 672 may 1986)
Water – Reflecting Water – Casablanca – Mare Orizzontale – Water Wind – Video Going – Liquid Movie – Liquid Gravity Center – Bronx – Mare di Marmo – Narciso