Como, huge technological portals retrace the founding themes of Fabrizio Plessi

From Oct. 5 to Nov. 17, 2024, the Palazzo del Broletto in Como will host the exhibition TUTTOPLESSI, curated by Paolo Bolpagni and Giovanni Berera, with scientific coordination by Ilaria Bignotti, promoted and organized by the Como Arte ETS Foundation, in collaboration with the Municipality of Como and under the patronage of the Lombardy Region and ASF Como. The exhibition aims to offer an overview of the sixty-year career of Fabrizio Plessi (Reggio Emilia, 1940), internationally renowned artist and pioneer of video art and video installations in Italy.

The technological revolution started by Fabrizio Plessi in the 1970s will be presented in an installation designed specifically for the hall of the medieval palace that once housed the city government. On display will be six giant technological portals, each of which will integrate a complex video system. Projected images will be reflected on a pool placed at the base of each portal, creating a dynamic effect of moving images. Each installation will visually represent the central themes of Plessi’s artistic research, linked to natural elements such as water, lightning, fire, lava, gold and smoke.

“The large structures designed for the Broletto in Como,” explains curator Paolo Bolpagni, “are, beyond the medium and language employed, like the cave paintings of Lascaux: tales, narratives of mythical truths, of archetypes, and at the same time gnoseological tools, which speak to us about us and nature, and about us as nature.”

These monumental arches will give life to a continuous flow of images and sounds, depicting spatiotemporal events: water flowing, lightning ripping through the sky, fire blazing, lava erupting, gold dripping and melting into the blackness of Vanitas, and smoke dissipating to reveal a view inspired by Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Prisons.

“Drawing charcoal, straw, marble, iron, earth,” says Fabrizio Plessi, “becomes a means of approaching and fully understanding the ancestral physicality of these materials, represented always and in any case in contact or confrontation with the means in use of technology. From this only apparent ”clash“ of such different substances, from these ”impossible cohabitations“ between the poverty of the natural and the iridescent richness of the electronic, from these forced assemblages that then became almost biologically communicating vessels, from all these ”different possibilities,“ multiple, infinite projects have been born over the years, perfectly studied and represented, many of which are still unrealized.”

Ilaria Bignotti explains that the title of the exhibition, TUTTOPLESSI, “is a bold, peremptory title that looks at the river of fluctuating, dynamic, passionate projects and installations, videosculptures and video narratives that the master has made over thespan of almost sixty years of research and production... Fabrizio Plessi is a technological warrior, an ancient poet, a fearless explorer who, like an alchemist, knows how to mix nature and culture, technology and art, word and image, sound and mechanization, light and water.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Alberto Peruzzo Editore, edited by the Como Arte ETS Foundation.

Hours: Daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Como, huge technological portals retrace the founding themes of Fabrizio Plessi

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