Scintilla e Combustione

The artist Mario Deluigi is the creator of the two mosaics, Scintilla and Combustione, made from rectangular yellow and black industrial tiles, which were removed from the wall of the Enel ‘Teodora’ thermoelectric power station in Porto Corsini. The original structure was built in 1959 by Veneziana S.A.D.E. to a design by the architect Ignazio Gardella.
The two mosaics are currently housed within a protective structure on the forecourt next to the power station itself.
Deluigi was a leading figure in post-war Italian art; influenced by Cubism in his youth, he was a proponent of Spatialism in the 1950s, before concluding his artistic evolution with his ‘grattages’ (i.e. ‘scraping’) period. He also taught set design, first at the Academy of Fine Arts and then at the University Institute of Architecture (IUAV) in Venice, and was a close friend of the sculptor Alberto Viani and the renowned Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa. The two mosaics appear in a sequence from Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece, Il deserto rosso (1964), filmed in Ravenna and winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
Conference organized by: Accademia di Belle Arti di Ravenna 
Speakers: Giovanni Bianchi, University of Padua; Angelo Lorenzi, Milan Polytechnic – Mantua Campus; Alberto Giorgio Cassani, Academy of Fine Arts, Ravenna.