LUX REMOTA — Context Study

In LUX REMOTA, memory does not appear as a scene that might be recovered intact, but as a surface that has retained alterations. Maurizio Valch arranges a nocturnal blue sky above a sequence of earthly planes; yet what is decisive is not the possible evocation of a place, but the unstable condition of this ground. The colours are not organised as pure bands or as a fixed landscape: they remain separated by irregular encounters, glazes, and areas where the painting seems to have been reconsidered. The distance announced by the title refers not only to the suspended white sphere, but also to that which, though inscribed in matter, can no longer appear again in the same way.

The process Valch describes—layering, covering, reducing, scraping, and incising—gives this composition a specific temporality. Beneath the upper blue, pale pink, ochre, blue-grey, green, and orange form a sedimentation rather than a panoramic view. The large red rectangle, eroded to reveal blue beneath, concentrates this logic: it is not a form applied over a stable ground, but a presence crossed by what preceded it. The two fine stairways, barely inscribed among the strata, likewise do not resolve a narrative path; they make visible the attempt to cross a surface whose layers never fully communicate. The painting thus preserves material decisions and their revisions without turning them into biographical anecdote. Here, memory becomes transformed ground, not a static archive.

Its presentation in a contemporary gallery makes LUX REMOTA’s double condition clear: it is a 120 × 80 cm surface and, at the same time, a territory that asserts itself from afar. The low, oblique view emphasises its three-centimetre depth and allows the space’s warm light to reach the canvas without isolating it through theatrical illumination. Against the concrete floor, white walls, and visible industrial architecture, the worn matter of the red block and lower bands takes on a precise physical presence. The lateral sequence of other works and sculptures places the painting in a real space of observation, while its blue night retains its own distance: it does not offer the past as a finished image, but as strata that still reveal, between layers, the transformation that produced them.

Context references

LUX REMOTA Maurizio Valch gallery · contemporary abstract painting in gallery · horizontal abstract painting for gallery · abstract art with horizon and stairways · blue and red painting for white wall · minimalist abstract landscape

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.