Forest of Fire

Fabrizio Plessi (1940) attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. Since the late 1960s he has been interested in the possibilities of using new technologies, new media, modern means of spreading the image and the word in art. Through the monitors (TV-screens inserted inside his sculptures-installations) speak primordial and mythical elements: water with its cathartic flow and renewal, fire with its strength and its threat, air with its impalpable freedom, the land with its brutal texture, sounds with their evocative charm. In "Forest of Fire" (2001) Plessi builds a forest through a theory of rusty iron caryatid-structures within which trunks, branches and bundles, belonging to different species of trees, appear stacked, tied, layered according to a different design. Beneath the woods are placed monitors that project the images of an incessant burning. Technology is never the ultimate goal of the work, because the primitive, heroic dimension of the latter, its archaic appearance claims the idea of a warm ritual, a magical place, far from the icy rigor of the virtual world.