Tempo Liquido

»Tempo Liquido« is one of the main works of Fabrizio Plessis. The five-meter-high mill wheel is a steel construction that carries a monitor on each blade, on whose matte screen the falling water can be seen. The constantly turning wheel with its monitors is immersed in the real water that gushes out of a gutter and seems to have fallen from the mill wheel.

Plessi's artistic strategy is to let appearance and reality, illusion and reality collide harshly. Just as the monitor water of the mill wheel dips into the real water, Plessi confronts the image of appearance with the facts of reality in many of his works. It is not always immediately clear where appearance ends and being begins. The perceptual interest arises from the almost successful deception of being able to confuse the electronic water with the real water. At the same time, there is an ironic aha effect of having been consciously guided by the artist to perceive the difference between appearance and reality. The media art of moving images creates a strong approximation to the real - but at the same time it is the means of unmasking the illusion. Plessi tells the story of the clash of two spheres, unmasking the apparent unity of water and breaking it down into two. "You shall believe - and you shall not believe," is Plessi's message.

Plessi had created the first version of "Tempo Liquido" for the newly built Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato. The second version, which is now in the ZKM collection, he had made in 1993 for the Philips company for the Radio Exhibition in Berlin.



[1993]