Mario Surbone: Incisi 1968-1978. The Concision of Form

The Stelline Foundation is hosting an exhibition that wants to rediscover an artist in its most fruitful production, little known to the public but always appreciated by critics: Mario Surbone was a student of Felice Casorati at Accademia Albertina in Turin. Surbone belongs to that family of artists, that moved independently from the lesson of Fontana and then from the “Azimuth” group. They have worked not on the canvas but with the canvas .

Curated by Elena Pontiggia, the exhibition presents works created in the ’60s and’ 70s, the period that the artist has dedicated to the series ‘Incisi’: Cardboard plans created with cuts in a counterpoint of light and shade, with a secularly mystical sensitivity, opposing to the informal art of those years with requirement of measurement, rhythm and silence. Manzoni wrote “There is nothing more to say. We can only be”.
“The same space of the painting, apparently so circumscribed and closed” becomes “unlimited,” hiding “the mysterious depths,” he suggests “distances, coming to be a subject, indeed un’antimateria” and “geometric composition is not painted on the canvas, but inferred and generated directly” from it.
The contrast between shadow and light is essential in the work of Surbone, and sometimes his works take the form of origami, tangram, oriental games, which focus largely on the shadow discovery.