PLESSI Fabrizio

Fabrizio Plessi (Reggio Emilia, 1940 – Dolo, 2026) was one of the leading figures in international video art, able to transform electronic technology into a poetic tool. His installations often bring moving images into dialogue with physical materials—wood, stone, iron, architectural structures—creating environments in which viewers perceive both the weight of matter and the fluidity of light. Water and fire, recurring elements in his work, become images that evoke memory, energy, and transformation.

Venice, water and the first experiments

Having trained in Venice, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and later taught, Plessi developed a particular sensitivity to the relationship between natural elements and built space. In the late 1960s, he began to focus his research on water, exploring it through actions, films, photographs and video experiments. L’s water was not merely a subject to be filmed: it represented an unstable phenomenon, impossible to capture once and for all in a still image.

In the 1970s, performances and his first videotapes allowed him to explore movement and duration. The recordings documented actions and transformations, but also opened up a new possibility: using electronic media to construct an autonomous visual experience. The transition from painting to technology was therefore not a complete break, but rather an extension of an exploration of light and time.

Video sculptures and electronic environments

From the 1980s onward, Plessi developed his video sculptures and video installations in increasingly complex ways. Screens and monitors were integrated into material structures that altered their meaning. L’s image of a flowing stream could pass, in the imagination, through a wooden or stone structure; electronic fire could appear contained within a solid object. This gave rise to a tension between the immaterial character of the luminous image and the tangible nature of its supports.

Works and projects such as Liquid Time, Baroque Cathodic Movements and Ex Machina testify to Plessi’s ability to conceive installations in which technology, sound and architecture become parts of a single experience. The spectacular element does not exhaust the meaning of the works: behind the movement of the screens, one can discern a reflection on the relationship between nature, artifice and cultural memory.

Drawing, projects and prints

An important part of his work involves drawings and sketches, which precede or accompany the construction of the installations. These sheets are not merely technical documents: they often reveal an independent compositional sensibility, made up of lines, annotations, areas of color and images that seek to make visible an idea still in flux. The relationship between the project and the completed work is particularly significant in a practice that requires collaboration between artistic and technological expertise.

For an accurate description of a work on paper, it is essential to distinguish between an original drawing, mixed media, an editioned print, and a reproduction of a project. Similarly, a photograph of an installation is not the same as the installation itself. The signature, technique, any edition size, and provenance must be verified for each individual piece.

Plessi’s work has helped demonstrate that electronic devices can become instruments of emotion and contemplation. His artworks preserve the memory of traditional materials while showing the possibility of an image in constant transformation: an encounter between nature’s time and technology’s.