In Florence, an art gallery in an air-raid shelter opens with the exhibition ‘Oro’ by Fabrizio Plessi

The ‘Digital Refuge’ opens in Florence with the exhibition “Oro” by Fabrizio Plessi, from 14 April to 31 May: in via della Fornace 41, under Piazzale Michelangelo and a stone’s throw from the Arno, a new exhibition space inside a ancient gallery that was used as an air-raid shelter in 1943, as a place of defense for civilians from the bombings of the Second World War, which today is proposed as a place dedicated to the promotion of digital art, where architecture, design, photography, cinema, literature and all the other multiple artistic and expressive forms find their own dimension by dialoguing with each other. The space is inaugurated by the artist Fabrizio Plessi, a contemporary alchemist among the first experimenters of video art in Italy, who exhibits one of his unpublished works entitled “Gold” in collaboration with Tornabuoni Arte. The “Refuge of the Furnace”, once a refuge from a tragic reality, is now “Digital Refuge”, a space of 165 square meters, a place of rebirth, where technology meets art, giving life to a contemporary space in which it is possible to explore creativity through the current language of technology. The redevelopment project of what until recently was a dark hovel in a state of high decay, was curated by the Archea Associati studio and will welcome digital realities of all kinds, always with an eye to the future and new avant-gardes, but also at events and performances. The experience here will be immersive and will pass through 16 screens arranged along the 33 meters of the tunnel. Fabrizio Plessi (who inaugurates the space in collaboration with the Forma Edizioni publishing house) is an artist considered among the forerunners of Videoart in Italy. The artist exhibits “Oro”, a site-specific work that starts from the walls of translucent material with which the tunnel is covered to create a gigantic golden mosaic, which as it melts moves and breathes “in its underground liquidity, resplendent and sumptuous” . The artist has imagined a single large work that can almost biologically coexist with this anomalous and sensorial circular architecture. The nocturnal and luminous reverberation of the golden surfaces of the work changes, alters, swells and expands like the waves of an evocative and abstract sea, in continuous movement. “The Digital Refuge is nothing more than an innovative cultural crossroads which, precisely in a city like Florence, finds a stimulus to confront and overlap the existing one”, says Fabrizio Plessi. Plessi’s artistic research has always revolved around the themes of water and of fire rendered through video installations, video sculptures and videotapes. In the seventies, he was one of the first to use the monitor as the main subject and tool for his projects. His works, exhibited in the most important museums in the world, keep the dialogue with classicism alive, creating a link between past and future.