Since the 1980s, Fabrizio Plessi has been experimentally and pioneeringly anticipating uses of the digital set design now widespread, and has created numerous electronic sets for television, theatre, contemporary dance or as stand-alone shows, including those of the trilogy of choreographer and director Frédéric Flamand’s The Fall of Icarus (1989), Titanic (1992) and Ex machina (1994), as well as Pirandello’s Dress the Undressed (2010), Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (2006) and Fenix DNA installed at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice (2017).

The exhibition at Palazzo Collicola, realised in collaboration with the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia (which first exhibited the electronic scenes of the trilogy at the Magazzini del Sale in March 2022), presents a digital reconstruction of the 6 most engaging and innovative electronic sets among the many realised in Plessi’s career, through films, photos, projects, drawings and notes by the artist, which projected onto as many reconstructions of monumental wooden and digital books flow like pages of memories and fantastic tales.

If the trilogy choreographed by Flamand metaphorically expresses the tensions, anxieties and catastrophes of contemporaneity, increasingly dependent on media and digital instrumentation, the theatre of Pirandello (transmitted on stage, together with the actors by monitor images) and Shakespeare (with costumes and high-speed helmets) has been revisited by Plessi with highly innovative and futuristic scenic installations, triggering suggestions that make them true works of total art, following the idea that the artist has been experimenting with since 1987 with the large installation Roma presented at Documenta in Kassel. It is Fenix DNA, an immersive work, dedicated to the rebirth of the Phoenix, that ideally closes the circle, staging the same primary and natural elements of the artist’s poetics, including fire, water and lightning. The large digital pages projected on monumental wooden books, with more than two hundred images inside them, immersed in the darkness of the rooms on the ground floor of Palazzo Collicola, in their flowing as if moved by the wind, give a sense of the design of the theatre works, revealing the very workshop of the artist’s creativity in its phases of gestation, inspiration, euphoria, fantasy and visionary spirit, demonstrating that the creative principle of the artist is still the sign that the hand traces on the sheet of paper.

Almost as if to tell us that at bottom the most intimate structure of Plessi’s work communicates and romantically stages, as in a dream that has never been interrupted, his instinctive passion for theatricality and the spectacular magic of art.

The exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of the Fondazione Marignoli di Montecorona and “Amici di Palazzo Collicola” association.

Opening hours Palazzo Collicola:
Wednesday to Monday 10.30-13.00 / 15.30-19.00