Mario Deluigi

Mario Deluigi was born in Treviso in 1901. The artist’s production was characterized by the use of grattage, a technique that required creating marks in negative, engraved on the surface layers of the painting, characterized by a lumpy and material surface. Color and light were the foundations of the artist’s research and the grattage works, fulcrum of his artistic production, were conceived and created in harmony with the spatialist current to which the artist adhered.

These were mainly single colors, presented as tangles of scratches on dry paint. The different mark thickening scales generated variations in brightness. The technique used by the artist was completely original and unique. Deluigi carried out an investigation on the spatial balance given by the thickening and rarefaction of the marks, from which the variations of light arised. This grating technique, well defined at the 1954 Venice Biennale in the work entitled Motivi sui Vuoti, characterized all his subsequent production.

Each gesture mark conveyed an idea, an image with a precise meaning previously studied. To scratch the surface of his painting and reveal the luminous soul of the colors previously applied, Mario Deluigi used different pointed instruments such as razor blades, cutters, scalpels and sometimes even the back of the brush or spatula.

He was born in Treviso and moved to Venice with his family at an early age; he never left the lagoon city again. After graduating from art school – where he met the woman he would marry and a friend for life, Carlo Scarpa, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts, meeting Ettore Tito and Virgilio Guidi as his teachers.

He exhibited his works for the first time in 1928, at the XIX Collective of the Opera Bevilacqua La Masa and in 1930 he took part in the Venice Biennale. Deluigi developed a style based on the plastic simplification of forms, which he also applied to mosaic and sculpture. During the war he met Arturo Martini who appointed him as his successor at the Academy chair. However, this job was not recognized because he did not have the Fascist party card, which was essential to have the right to a retirement scheme.

Despite being excluded from the Academy, he taught at the Artistic Institute, at the Free School of Plastic Art – founded in 1946 together with Carlo Scarpa and Antonio Giulio Ambrosini, at the University of Architecture of Venice (IUAV), at the University International Art and at the Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst in Salzburg. Alongside his pictorial activity he created mosaic decorations, works of applied art, scenographies as well as drafting poetic texts.

Approaching abstract art, in 1951 he was one of the petitioners of the Manifesto of space art – founded by Lucio Fontana – and in 1952, of the Manifesto of space movement for television.

From the thirties he took part in several editions of the Venice Biennale and between the sixties and seventies he exhibited his works in national and international exhibitions. In 1980 the Venice Biennale organized a retrospective exhibition of his works in the Church of San Stae. In 1991, an important anthological collection was exhibited in the Gallery of Modern Art of Ca ‘Pesaro in Venice, and again in 1997 at Palazzo Ragazzoni – Flangini Biglia in Sacile.

The artist died in Venice on May 27, 1978.

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