CUSTODES — Context Study

Once the frontal view loses its privilege, the two presences in CUSTODES cease to assert themselves as rising figures and begin to read as cuts made into a prior distribution. The overhead view makes the upper black band, the orange, the greenish-grey, and the ground divided between red and blue especially clear: contiguous fields whose coexistence already contains friction before the dark bodies appear. On the 80 × 120 cm canvas, laid horizontally on the floor, verticality is flattened without disappearing; it becomes a matter of position and weight within a measured surface. The barely visible incisions offer no route for the eye: they graze or cross the areas of colour as material traces, consistent with Valch’s language, in which cutting into paint means physically altering its strata rather than simply drawing upon them.

This loss of hierarchy between figure and field allows us to approach a broader concern of the artist: no form occupies a place from nothing. His experience of movement has distinguished between paths that can be traced on a map and an inner movement whose direction is not secured by it. In this light, the small marks in CUSTODES may be felt as indications of measure rather than routes. The two masses do not embody identities that explain themselves; they maintain a distance, receive pressure from neighbouring edges, and remain exposed to a territory that precedes them. The guardianship suggested by the title thus shifts from surveillance towards a more uncertain task: attending to the provisional order that allows several presences to share a field without merging into it.

The essays From Dream to Territory and When the Ground Appeared help clarify this condition. Valch has described the passage from more suspended spaces towards a ground that supports, separates, and orders, without thereby becoming a neutral base. EMERSIO names precisely the moment when something distinguishes itself from what contained it and, in doing so, loses the protection of the undifferentiated. Seen from above, CUSTODES intensifies this idea: territory does not remain behind the figures as landscape, but distributes their margins, scales, and resistances. The orange strip makes the separation between them visible; the blue and red beneath them do not function as stable ground, but as partitions that continue to demand a taking of position. Neither presence definitively dominates this organisation.

An affinity with Barnett Newman may, in a specific way, illuminate the decisive character of a minimal division within a broad field. Yet Valch’s separations do not seek the affirmative clarity of the zip: they retain irregularity, variations in density, and the trace of worked material. The overhead framing also changes the physical relation to the piece: surrounded by flooring and partially contained by the domestic setting, the painting appears less as a vertical window than as an extended territory that can be circled. From this distance, guardianship no longer seems to protect a fixed boundary, but to sustain the shifting conditions of a shared limit.

Context references

CUSTODES Maurizio Valch · contemporary orange and blue abstract painting · abstract art with monolithic forms · territorial painting with fields of colour · 80 x 120 cm vertical abstract painting · abstract painting with incisions · contemporary minimalist wall art

About this visualization

This visualization places the artwork within an architectural context to help collectors and viewers imagine its presence in a real space. It is an interpretive reference, not an exact reproduction: the original work remains the sole authority for scale, color, surface and material presence.