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.