Digital Gold 1

Fabrizio Plessi (Reggio Emilia, 1940), well known for his Italian and international video art, is a digital innovator and a pioneer of new media who has created a series of digital works inspired by the various symbols of gold. The project confirms the artist’s continuous interest in pushing beyond the physical, entering a hybrid dimension that connects the material experience with the spiritual one.

Gold is a symbol of well-being, luxury and wealth. Since ancient times, gold has been used to adorn physical appearance, enhance beauty, and demonstrate power or social status. The rare but easily malleable mineral transforms from coins into an elegant piece of jewellery until it becomes an ingot. In this dimension, gold is associated with a specific economic value that contrasts its material solidity with rapid and irrational volatility, causing tension between digital and real value. The viewer is left hypnotized to ponder, confronting a sensual fluid that moves like a snake, changing, transforming, and regenerating with each cycle. Plessi shows a continuous passage of time in which perception is deceived by a sense of satisfaction, and excitement that the melting of gold causes in us. The solid shape becomes liquid, leaving a void in the screen. The depth of a colour linked to the divine, to the sun god Ra, to a mountain teeming with gold from which life generates and to our eternal tension towards it.