Fabrizio Plessi
The famous, appreciated video sculptor Fabrizio Plessi for the Golden Palace, Turin.
Appreciated the world over thanks to his very personal path as a video sculptor and also present at the Venice Biennale 2006 with the mega installation Vertical Sea, Fabrizio Plessi designed a work especially for the Golden Palace with a sunny, warm, metaphysical suggestion: three cascades of gold, silver and bronze, in motion within three monitor spaces. Liquid metals that surprise with their highly energetic effect. A simple work and at the same time a very rich, immediate one, a signal of contrast, in its exaltation of noble matter and movement, with respect to the too-easy idea of Turin the austere city.
Interview to Fabrizio Plessi by Donatella Cinzano for THI Magazine, October 2005.
You’re Emilian by birth and Venetian by adoption. What made
you decide to study and live in Venice? Did your family support your choice?
As a boy I decided to study art in secondary school and later attended the “Accademia delle Belle Arti” in Venice because it was undoubtedly the most important place for art in Italy then, one of the most important in the world. It was the best choice for a young man’s training. The human experience was an extraordinary educational opportunity, too, the possibility to move and grow in an architectural
environment, in a lifestyle so rich from the artistic and cultural point of view. More than a touristic city, Venice was a cultivated city, the city of the Biennale. It was also the city where I made a name for myself, where I came into contact with the greatest contemporary masters who exhibited at the Guggenheim, where I taught at the art school while still a student at the “Accademia”. My grandmother and my father supported this course: they not only approved, they wanted me to become an artist.
In your work, natural matter meets up with electronic
instruments and advanced technologies. Your work is like a
bridge between the substance of origins and a present in
motion, forward-looking. How does this type of poetry take
shape?
My work is intended to be first and foremost an emotional experience. I’d like the public, in encountering the work, to experience the emotions that I myself feel in conceiving
it. Emotions that take shape from the contrast, from the fusion of that which is poor, like iron, stone and straw, with the complexity and richness of electronics. Throughout my career I’ve always tried to create harmonies by making use of the tension between opposites. Blending historical memory and digital is the emotional core of this work, it’s the wager of a solitary navigator. Of an alchemist guided by feeling.
Your video sculptures seem to amplify memory and imagination. Looking at “Rome”, or “Liquid Crystals”, is like going along a river, stopping at a spa, or coming across a submerged city, by chance, while swimming in the Mediterranean. There’s nothing cold, it’s a map that breathes. There’s a great deal of travel in your work, for us who observe it. Do you like to travel?
I’m a traveller. The voyage is the raw material of my work, a poetics intent on suggesting Mumbai or Rome as a “Plessi place”, which for me means an authentic perception of the place’s spirit, almost a biological transcription, a three-dimensional sign of its reality. I observe, I listen, I collect visual fragments, reflections, sensations of travel, that suddenly converge in an intuition in the white of my studio. The white of this space always in wait for an idea to make itself aware of its form.
In the free play of contrasts that you have narrated for us the poor things mix with precious matter and sophisticated techniques, like a mosaic. What is the concept of richness for you, in artistic terms? What is luxury for you in general?
Richness is the emotional content of the work. Luxury is fidelity. I’m a man who is faithful to everything. To my wife Carla, whom I owe a lot to, to my children Rocco and Maria Sole, to my work. Creating is an intense pleasure, having the ones you love nearby is a stroke of incomparable good fortune. It’s a luxury, in the sense of a privilege, to be able to look out on the dazzling light of the Mediterranean, here in Majorca, or on the veiled, liquid lights of Venice, my two studio-homes. I like these houses a lot, the luminous architectures I feel I belong to, absolute spaces surrounded by water. Shelters. Where my sight consumed by the journey finds itself again. Travel is a luxury, too. I’m often in hotels. I choose the room with care. I move a piece of furniture, orienting it differently in space. The orientation is fundamental. The room becomes my home, my habitat. I feel an enormous pleasure in hotels.
Turin will host one of your works at the Golden Palace. What impression did you get of this city? Can you tell us something about the work?
In Turin it doesn’t feel like I’m in Italy. Turin is
French, or maybe on the border. To tell you the truth it’s a city I don’t know very well. It gives me a sensation of rigour. The work for the Golden Palace is intended as a sunny, warm, metaphysical suggestion, to surprise the hotel’s guests in their first impact with the place. Three cascades of gold, silver and bronze. Liquid metals to surprise with a dynamic, high-energy effect. A signal that is also estranging for the visitor, why not?
Is there a figurative artist among the classics that you have liked more, or that indelibly influenced your training?
As a boy I encountered the greatest artists of our time at the Guggenheim in Venice. But I do have one regret: not having known Picasso personally, who I feel was great in everything. I may have loved him more than anyone else.
You’re a visual artist. But the word? Can verbal language give rise to an image of form and matter?
The word is important. It isn’t able to reach the levels of immediacy and synthesis of the image. It arrives more slowly, but more surely. Some of my works accommodate the written word. Which this way becomes matter, in addition to meaning. And this way, transfigured, it says even more.