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Fabrizio Plessi. Bombay-Bombay: A Video Installation and One Hundred Drawings (1976-1992)
When Leonardo da Vinci designed his machines or made anatomical studies, he recorded what he was imagining and seeing in his drawings. The artists of the 19th century who were attracted by the adventure of travel recorded their sketches from life in their notebooks in order to maintain alive in their minds the memory of what they had discovered. When Joan Miró, distancing himself from immediate reality, sought his own vocabulary of signs, he would use drawing as an indispensable step towards expressing himself, ultimately on canvas, with his own particular language.
These are perhaps some of the examples over time – we could find many more – that demonstrate, in short, how drawing has been a resource throughout the history of Western art that allowed artists to give form to a reflection, to capture a snapshot, to express an emotion, and so on.
Drawing is essential to Fabrizio Plessi’s work because, as the artist says, it allows him ‘to modify and invert the lapidary and static order of things’, and that is how, from drawing, he conceives his video installations. He similarly states that through drawing the artist can ‘overturn the very meaning of the work and extend its potential beyond circumscribed confines’. Thus, starting from the static nature of the sketch on paper, Fabrizio Plessi sees the flow of water, the main protagonist of his work. In the same way, first ‘to enter and exit endlessly, to and from the confines of preconstituted logic’, returning to the artist’s definition of drawing, and then the drawing breaks away from the two-dimensional limits of the paper and expands into space, where the artist materialises his work.
In addition to their remarkable quality, we are certainly delighted to have the opportunity to present these hundred drawings by Plessi, which make up the exhibition Bombay-Bombay: A Video Installation and One Hundred Drawings (1976-1992), because it is through this compact body of work that we can reach the deepest and most intimate sense of the artist’s oeuvre.
Nonetheless, this vision would have been somewhat incomplete without the presence of the final part of the journey, the finished work. It is for this reason that the installation Bombay-Bombay, one of Plessi’s most recent works, assumes a special significance, as it helps to show, in a general way, the entire evolutionary cycle in the gestation of his work, and at the same time gives us an integrating vision of it.
Rosa Maria Malet
Director of the Fundació Joan Miró
