Mario Deluigi
Interviews
Mario Deluigi "A Cavallino painter"
"... In fact, we believe – no, you believe - that spatiality is the way of being meaning the fraction of time allowed to the physical instant before it re - immerses itself in the cosmos. A flash, a lightning bolt. And we found ourselves instead, with a spatial logic made of dimensions and of relationships far more artistic than could be found in the exhausted world of totems and idolsi".
"I look only for light"
R. Joos interviews Mario Deluigi
"... For my part, having atoned for (I don't say suffer) the properties of the signs and then of the voids and then again the rapport between solids and voids, always imbued with the spatial concept and in surfaces, I realised that a signs are valid in themselves, as are the forms they beget; they are of equal value and they cancel each other out – discharging meanings and showing the true essence of contemporary plastic thought, that is emotional light."
Q. "Do you maintain that light, the central character in your painting, releases a determining effect in the economy of the work?"
A. "Definitely. And I mean: plastic light, that is … light that you hear - as I maintain that light in the plastic language actually is – and in my case it is, exactly, the central character in the work. It is harder to explain in words quite the conditions under which it can be achieved, a kind of physical decay, a way of being born of inevitable causality, like the sudden caesura of our existence in space from which light comes and goes … and you hear it. Just listen."
A. "What I mean to say is that plastic light is the physical embodiment of abstract language: express in language the abstract condition of contemporary thought."
Or:
A. "And, for example, to use the word 'abstract' does not mean only to inference of form but rather the inevitable reality of an eternal existence in space interrupted only by the caesura of a physical event that amounts to nothing in the universal scale."
Q. "Abstraction?"
A. "it is a way of understanding existence"
Or:
A. "And to say 'abstract' does not mean deduction or outpouring of one shape into another but it is what we are now, like this for ever, the rest is pure circumstance. Whatever sign belongs to a 'before' or an 'after' – and how few signs humanity uses to communicate – and how many are lost by belonging to the unknown."
1975 April "Just light and shade for me"
L. Vincenzi interviews M. Deluigi
"The whole of modern art is a form of violence against the public, really corrosive. I who have always dedicated myself to abstract research, feel that the only way out of this crisis will be through a return to the figure and to landscape.
My painting does not present an alluring argument because it resembles contemporary life, convulsed and fragmentary. When we were young we looked at Mondrian who had re - conquered the surface with a grammatical sense of reality. The masters who went before us went straight to the essence; we who come after are all shards of that famous vase; those in turn who will succeed us, if things do not change, will be even more fragmented.
...Venice: what's left, painting her, if one destroys the signs? The light remains. At times I have such fear of removing so much of the picture that I leave shadows whose only role is to clarify the concept of my light. Fear that is nothing if not desert."
"An encounter with Mario Deluigi, painter of light"
"... then I slowly eliminated everything that could have been this 'physiological' representation and realised that I must seek out the light, in other words, structural values. I had to build the light, but not as Tobey had done, just carrying on with a kind of illustrative print. I understood that by destroying the sign I had removed all that could be significant and: by so doing, the light could now appear. This is the road I have travelled to bring my painting to the point it is today."
A. Ballis
'looking at your work, it seems as if you remove segments of colour in such a manner as to rip out the surface of the canvas.'
'It is not exact: my procedure involves spreading the cromatic values in such a way as to retrieve them when I scrape. So it is not that I go digging for the white, I might find pink, green, black or any other colour that I deliberately put there. This is precisely what I do: spread the colours according to a prior chromatic plan, then as a next step, discover the soul of this or that colour – which has a light, one that I must construct – which is why I cannot make a mark more imposing than that which occurs in the pre - ordained plan.'
'… what I make is a construction: I go ahead gradually eliminating signs as I make them because I must see them only by means of thought. Practically speaking, it is an indirect act rather than a direct one, indeed I would say (though the word lends itself to several interpretations) that it is a 'state.'
' … Your quadrennial presentation in oils made a profound impression on me: although, as you know, I have always followed your work with interest. In their midst there is the clarification of a problem you have been working on for a long time. I don't believe in the 'nebuleuses' of : Bill, a man full of good intentions but with his face set firmly against the dramatic, and more than dramatic, aspect of contemporary art. In which, like Giedion and the Swiss in general, he refuses to see any of the creative joys and promise for the future that are entailed.
Now what I think of your painting, is that it poses with great clarity the whole question of space as theory: and not in the sense of a greater or lesser probability, but in that the 'operable' hypothesis is the fundamental condition of being hic et nunc. What you call the solidification of light is not deep down a phenomenological definition – and therefore necessarily founded upon the actual fact of light – of space. Naturally, to put the question of space and light in these terms or, better still, to show how difficult it is for our conscience to make itself or give itself a space, means recognising and declaring the limits of our conception of the world and of life – and in the most rigorous way even if not in the most explicit – those of whoever shows his drama in social evidence.
In any case, as per Dorazio, it seems to me important that in the general Vernichtung of gesture and of materials one reproposes the whole problem of the value of the concept of space: that the presence of a thought or, rather, a preoccupation in the modern conscience about space is, above all, an absolute phenomenal reality.
* = Argan refers to the definition of 'cloudy' given by Max Bill to a group of pictures by Mario Deluigi (Motivi sui Vuoti) which were shown at the Biennale di Venice in 1954