Fabrizio Plessi Mare Verticale
7 August 2025
Cadoro · Mare Verticale · 2009
Fabrizio Plessi’s video installation Mare Verticale is an outstanding example of the connection between technology, nature, and art in public spaces. Plessi, a pioneer of video art, presents his fascination with the element of water in a monumental form with this work.
The first version of Mare Verticale was created in 2000 for the Italian pavilion at the Expo in Hanover. The work consists of a 44-meter-high, self-supporting metal structure with computer-controlled LED screens that play sound. It symbolizes the sea in a vertical orientation and pays homage to the maritime culture that is omnipresent in his adopted home of Venice.
In 2005, Plessi presented an updated version of Mare Verticale at the entrance to the Giardini during the 51st Venice Biennale. This installation, a totem made of steel and aluminum, welcomed visitors with a technological interpretation of the sea.
The 2009 version of the work presented at Cadoro, in the typical shape of a Venetian boat, a San Pierotta, with bright blue digital water plunging into the depths inside it—but at the same time suggesting the boat’s path toward the sky—is six meters high and made of Corten steel. The three screens are embedded in the metal structure.
Plessi’s special position within the field of video art is the combination of the electronic medium with archaic forms and contexts; it is not the film itself that is the actual work of art, but the entire video sculpture. The film appears, in a sense, (only) as moving painting in a sculptural setting. Fabrizio Plessi’s use of color always remains close to his Italian homeland: the rust-colored casings with the shimmering blue electronic rivers are reminiscent of his beloved Venice.
Plessi’s video art is characterized by the transitions between fiction and reality. By creating dreamlike situations in which the laws of reality are suspended, Plessi succeeds in transforming reality into a state in which the imagination can unfold and give rise to new visions. The violence of the forces that Plessi lends to the elements of water (and fire) draws analogies to Heraclitus’ conception of the cycle of nature as an endless process of becoming and passing away.
Plessi often makes preliminary sketches as part of the creative process for his sculptures. Such a study exists for his Mare Verticale works, created in preparation for the first work in 2005.
This summer, in honor of Fabrizio Plessi’s 85th birthday, we are presenting a solo exhibition of Fabrizio Plessi’s work at the Cadoro Center for Art and Science in Mainz, just in time for our summer festival on August 16, 2025. The exhibition will feature key works from the extensive œuvre of the Venetian-based artist and pioneer of video art.
