In the midst of their cascades, these golden waterfalls bear the inscription Pax Tibi, the incipit of the phrase printed on the Gospel that the Lion of Venice holds between its paws. Pax Tibi, Marce, evangelista meus, peace upon thee, Venice, as timeless as the noble and pure material. In Venice gold is a symbol, and it also represents the artisan know-how of the indoratore (gilder), which Fabrizio Plessi here translates into a contemporary digital flow, to bind together the eternal and apparent opposition between primordial elements and technologies, nature and artifice, tradition and future.

The windows of the Museo Correr on the side of Piazza San Marco opposite the Basilica provide the venue for the spectacular, luminous and sonorous appearance of golden waterfalls without origin or end, a powerful and eye-catching magmatic loop bursting on the scene at the heart of what was once the Serenissima.

L'Età dell'Oro (The Golden Age) represents a suspended and circular time enveloping Venice without nostalgia but with a concrete sense of the present, in a city that is today suffering but is of an eternal, incorruptible beauty that survives all. Here art does not deceive: the technological and intangible work does not pretend to be anything else but expands the golden matter in a fluid eternity, to pervade the time and space of the stone-built city surrounded by the lagoon and its infinite reflections of light.

In the same place that hosted the Waterfire installation twenty years ago, Fabrizio Plessi returns with L'Età dell'Oro as he turns 80 with a deep and emotional tribute to his city of choice and life, in a prologue to the major retrospective that will open with the same title in the autumn at the Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna di Ca' Pesaro.