CUTIS by Maurizio Valch in a Rustic Interior

The encounter with “CUTIS” takes place at an inescapably confrontational scale. At 210 × 140 cm, the viewer’s gaze is immediately captured by a colossal close-up that subverts Maurizio Valch’s earlier trajectory. If in his previous investigations abstraction operated as a cartography of geological accidents and territorial sediments, here that same material impulse collapses and concentrates in the architecture of a humanised face. Depth in this work sheds any claim to traditional perspective and appears instead as a physical accumulation of layers. It is not space that recedes, but matter that sinks into itself: the magnetic indigo-blue pupils act as optical abysses, while dense impasto in oil and acrylic reveals an archaeological excavation across the canvas, where painted flesh is built through the superimposition and scraping back of earlier strata.

“On confronting the surface of ‘CUTIS’, I understood that I was not leaving behind the mineral slopes of my STRATA series, but translating that geology into the living tissue of skin. Painting this face was not an act of decorative accumulation, but one of physical resistance against the support. It was there that I discovered the generosity of the practice, which does not lie in an excess of colour but in subtraction and surrender to accident. I decided that the surface had to be violated; that is why I made that turquoise incision that tears vertically across the cheek. This deliberate wound is a gesture of release in which the canvas stops protecting its material integrity and breathes through the scar, allowing the original ground and underlying tones to become visible as an offering of material honesty.”

The face’s asymmetry is organised around an implacable vertical crack that fragments the nose and lips, dividing the composition into two hemispheres operating under distinct formal tensions. This structural fracture should not be read as mere dissociation, but as the space of possibility for a complex communion. The two halves of the face do not seek harmonious fusion or accommodating symmetry; instead, they establish a dialogue of mutual resistance. This crack is what makes a silent bridge to the viewer possible. Communion occurs in the recognition of that fracture: the viewer does not see themselves in an intact mirror, but in the duality of a hieratic gaze that takes internal division as the only possible condition for sustaining presence before the other.

“In the half-light of the studio, while working on the dark contour that intersects the mouth, I understood that the gaze of these blue eyes demanded a renunciation. For the depth of that blue not to become a mere effect of light, it had to be intertwined with a disinterested search for communion. In letting go of the work, I accept that this face no longer belongs to me. The blue is not the reflection of my own gaze, but a shared territory where my identity as its maker dissolves to make way for another’s experience. Far from separating, the face’s dividing line invites us to inhabit the painting as a shared threshold, a space of passage where the boundary between my painted gesture and the viewer’s gaze is ultimately erased.”

Finally, the materiality of “CUTIS” becomes a tactile archive of human experience, a three-dimensional relief of ridges wrapped in pigment that claims its specific weight on the wall. It is in this linen skin that the three concepts of the analytical constellation collide and cohere. The generosity of showing the open wound on the cheek is nourished by the sedimentary depth of the brushstrokes, which in turn makes possible the communion of a shared gaze before fracture. The monumental face presented by Valch ceases to be a mimetic representation or an isolated psychological portrait, becoming instead a threshold where painting behaves as a living organism, reminding us that every surface is, at its core, a frontier waiting to be inhabited.

Context references

CUTIS Maurizio Valch · contemporary fragmented face painting · large painting with blue eyes · wall art for rustic wall · face painting in earth tones · Maurizio Valch FACIES artwork

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.