Born in 1901, he's the oldest of the artists we've been discussing so far. He joined the cubist movement with relish, went into abstracts and then started doing what he called grattages in the early '50s; of which these images are examples. He continued in this oeuvre until his death in 1978 in Venice. The image on the right is from his site, mariodeluigi.it where you can read the biography and see the images of paintings from different periods in his development. .
His biography doesn't elaborate much on this last technique but they do offer this, - quote " Deluigi continued his deliberation on connections between space, light and colour that would become a dominant theme in his work - where light is conceived as a structural device not simply painted but created within the canvas by means of strokes cut into the surface. This technique of ‘grattage’, which already appeared well - defined at the Biennale di Venice of 1954 in work entitled Motivi sui Vuoti (Motifs on Voids), characterises the whole of his subsequent output." unquote.
There are 22 images of the grattages on his site and although there were a few other images elsewhere, I didn't list the sites because the pics were so bad. Mario's work needs special photographic attention to properly record what is there. It's very easy for the reflective light to hide the details. Even of those 22 images, not all of them "come acrost". But yes, do visit his site.
As for that quote in the previous Mark Tobey Post, about Mario and Tancredi copying Tobey - I guess we'll never know. What with all the sites being in Italian, maybe they know. What we do know for sure is that for several decades there were quite a few artists pursuing this oeuvre of abstract, calligraphic mark making, and we can see the influence they had on each other's work.
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