Some biographical information:
(after "Mario Surbone" by Francesco De Bartolomeis,
Giulio Bolaffi Ed., 2007)
Mario Surbone was born in 1932 in Treville, in the
northern ltalian province of Alessandria. By the time he was fifteen,
he had already given evidence of his precocity in the research of a
personal style. He completed his education at the Artistic High School
and then the Albertine Academy in Turin, where he studied under Felice
Casorati. The desire to keep up to date took him to Paris for a first
time in 1957 and a second time, for a longer period spent studying and
working, in 1960-61. His first public appearance was in 1958, at the
National Exhibition of Youth Art in Rome.
Just as there are no traces of Casorati in his work, neither did he
ever produce anything, not even in his early days, to assimilate him
to the informal,
an in itself unfortunate term that the critics still use without
checking whether it implies any particular stylistic connotations.
Surbone channelled irregularities and contradictions into an audacious
inventiveness that went beyond the mere craft, whose mastery he
demonstrated abundantly already at an early age. After reviving
figuring by weaving it in with geometric shapes, he tackled the
adventure of his Carvings (1968-78), regular cuts in nearly always
cardboard supports. The elementary simplicity was obvious. Diagonals,
verticals and regular geometric shapes were expressions of rigour that
he then continued to pursue in his large-scale Acrylics on Wood, which
nearly always comprised several elements. His geometric shapes were in
relation to factors of nature, while his irregularities employed
subterranean methods, among others, to complicate harmony.
The approaches he has used to material vary considerably: from
incisions that penetrate into the layer of painting to vertical,
horizontal, oblique or indented apertures. His works are backed up not
only by drawings, but also by detailed elaborations on the same scale
as the finished products. Mario talks about sinopias, as they are
comparable to tracings for frescoes.
After the Carvings with their geometric
constructions and the Acrylics on Wood with their prevalence of
geometric shapes, the artist concentrated primarily on factors of
nature, free of the morphology of things, so as to inject his own
world into his representations. Shapes that were originally geometric
also penetrated into the essence of places, of people and of events.
Surbone's works require the observer to spend time studying them, to
change his distance and vantage point, so as to experiment the
repercussions on geometric delineations of the duality of
immersion-withdrawal and of interior digestion-expansion into
limitless space.
