The Golden Age: Fabrizio Plessi pays tribute to Venice with a site-specific installation created for the Museo Correr, in the spectacular setting of Piazza San Marco
The Golden Age: to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Maestro Fabrizio Plessi, who lives and works in Venice, from September 1 to November 15, 2020, Piazza San Marco becomes the venue for en plein-air video art.
Just as twenty years ago with Waterfire, his first installation in Piazza San Marco, as daylight fades Piazza San Marco turns to gold: in front of St. Mark’s Basilica, from the 15 windows of the Napoleonic Wing—closed and covered by large LED monitors reaching a total size of 4 x 50 meters—the great artist’s profound and moving tribute to his city of choice and life takes center stage.
A magmatic golden loop that bridges the apparent contrast between primordial and technological elements, nature and artifice, tradition and the future.
The Golden Age is a suspended and circular time that, without nostalgia but with a concrete sense of the present, envelops Venice—a city of eternal and incorruptible beauty that survives everything, conscious of its ability to regenerate even in times that are not golden.
A sentiment that Venezia da Vivere has embraced and gathered over recent months, together with the Associazione Piazza San Marco, in the project #RiscrivereilFuturo—interviews with citizens and people who love the city of Venice.
The installation is accompanied by music by Michael Nyman, the English composer, pianist, musicologist, and librettist, who in 2019 created a specific soundtrack for the Maestro’s work in the exceptional setting of the underground chambers of the Baths of Caracalla.
A detail of the installation is the appearance of the words “Pax Tibi,” the opening that every Venetian has known like a nursery rhyme from an early age: “Pax Tibi, Marce, evangelista meus,” meaning “Peace to you, Mark, my evangelist.” This phrase is engraved in the (open) book held firmly by the winged lion’s paw.
It is said that the origin of these words lies in the story of an angel who appeared to Saint Mark in a dream to announce that he would find peace among the Venetian people and their islands.
The main supporter of Fabrizio Plessi’s artistic intervention is the French maison Dior, which has an intimate relationship with the color gold as an unmistakable hallmark. One need only recall the redundant and figurative semantics of gold, in both plastic and chromatic forms, found in the famous perfume J’adore: the words “adore” and “Dior” both contain the suffix “or”.
A pioneer of video art in Italy—his first video installation dates back to 1970—Fabrizio Plessi is an artist who traces a formal mark imbued with philosophy, where art is thought taking shape in space.
The Golden Age is also the title of the major retrospective scheduled for this autumn at the Ca’ Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art.
PLESSI
The Golden Age
Museo Correr, Piazza San Marco
From September 1 to November 15, 2020
Photos are courtesy of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia.
