Fabrizio Plessi has dedicated much of his artistic practice to water as both motif and medium, using technology to make the element visible and sensorially present in ways that traditional sculpture alone cannot achieve. Since the 1970s he has combined steel, screens and video to create installations in which water appears as moving image — a fluid, almost living presence mediated through light and circuitry rather than physical substance.

In the Vertical Water works, Plessi arranges tall steel structures housing monitors that project cascading video water. The screens become conveyors of motion and rhythm: water that surges upward, reflects light and generates sound sequences invokes the phenomena of rising currents and streams, with a force and immediacy only possible through media art. This interplay of rigid industrial material and dynamic digital flow embodies Plessi’s fascination with the tension between the elemental and the virtual.

One of the grandest realisations of this series was shown at the 54th Venice Biennale, where Mari Verticali occupied multiple darkened rooms with massive vertical steel ‘hulls’ and towering screens presenting oceans in motion. In that context the work transformed the pavilion into an immersive encounter with water’s vertical energy and resonance, emphasising both its aesthetic power and its symbolic weight.