PARIS.- This water envelops everything with its reflections, spreading across the drawings, blurring their edges, and with its shimmering, it alters the pencil marks like an unstable, undulating elastic. This luminous flicker, entering through the windows, makes the drawing more fluid, unstable, mobile, evanescent, intangible. I could say that the pencil floats on the page without my knowing. -- Fabrizio Plessi

These are the words of Fabrizio Plessi, a rebel of contemporary art. Internationally recognized, with a long career and hundreds of solo exhibitions in major museums around the world, his work still surprises and challenges viewers today—like a sudden, crashing wave.

At the entrance, visitors are greeted by Splash (2019), a large-scale sculpture made up of four video elements. It seems to wait for our gaze, like a stone dropped into the red waters of a burning sea. It is a powerful work that reflects Plessi’s whole approach: consistent in vision, yet always evolving.

The exhibition explores how, starting in the late 1960s, Plessi developed a distinct artistic language, rooted in the principles of Arte Povera, only to quickly move beyond them. He has always avoided being boxed into artistic categories, saying that to do so, an artist must “navigate a path full of both ideological and creative traps, steering clear of the ordinary and the obvious.”

In 1982, the Centre Pompidou presented Plessi’s complete video works. That year also marked a shift in his practice, as he began to focus on video installations—adding physical structures and building immersive environments that make viewers feel lost, as though adrift in water.

This exhibition features a carefully curated selection of works that engulf the viewer’s field of vision. Water is present in all its undulating forms: water that engulfs and regenerates, water that flows and reflects, palingenetic water and mythological water, like a cerulean Ouroboros.

After all, as Plessi has declared, “the artist’s work” must be able to “deliver magnesium flashes to our retina and our brain, illuminating the dark and grey zones of our perception,” reminding us that “once our mind is opened to greater ideas, it will never return to its original structure.”