QUIES — Maurizio Valch | STRATA Abstract Painting

QUIES sets out its verticality as an accumulation of retained temperatures. In the upper band, blue-black and violet do not form a compact night: reddish remnants emerge, small abrasions of colour that make the darkness porous and worked. Below, the fields open into ochres, earth tones, veiled greens and warm greys, without ever settling into a smooth expanse; each area seems to have received a different pressure, as though the surface retained the trace of layers laid down, covered over and partially returned to view. The horizontal separations, irregular and at times edged with pink or whitish tones, do not divide with geometric precision: they tremble, yield, thicken or break off. The large dark block in the lower section gathers this movement without bringing it to a close. There is warmth in the painting, though not an expansive or luminous warmth: it is a low temperature, adhered to the material, making the distance between the strata perceptible. Before one knows what has been abandoned or what might be heard here, the composition requires one to remain before that distance, before a territory that does not offer itself all at once.

I work by allowing colour to retain its resistance rather than merely obeying a preconceived image. I lay down a layer, cover it, alter it, return to it; in that process, I accept that part of what appears may not remain entirely under my control. I do not understand abandonment as the disappearance of the hand, but as the decision not to correct until the surface becomes mute. I let certain veils breathe, allowing a dark area to retain an almost extinguished red or a pale line to remain undecided between edge, brush of contact and cut. When I give up fixing each relation too soon, the chromatic field begins to reveal its own pressure: ochres draw close to blacks, greens carry a different weight, and pinks become less decorative and more material. For me, painting also means sustaining that delay, not filling the space with an explanation. What remains after covering, scraping or spreading is not a resolved image, but a surface able to retain its changes.

The two minimal rectangles make this delay more precise. The white one, placed to the right in the upper field, does not occupy enough space to prevail over the dark expanse surrounding it; nevertheless, it concentrates a dry, almost withheld clarity that alters the density of the violets and blacks. It does not seem to open a passage or represent a recognisable object: rather, it functions as an interruption of scale, a small presence whose solitude makes the surrounding field seem vaster and more tense. The green rectangle, shifted to the left in the lower half, acts differently. Its depth absorbs more than it illuminates, and in doing so brings the veiled greens of the middle area into relation with the final dark block. Between the two elements, a listening without narrative takes shape: attending to their differences in colour, height and isolation requires abandoning the expectation of a central figure. The horizontal lines support this attention; their pale edges seem to register a barely audible vibration between layers. The warmth of the ochres, muted reds and pinks does not dramatise the scene, but persists as a material memory beneath areas that might have smothered it.

When I look at a painting like this, I ask myself what can be heard in a surface that narrates nothing directly. I listen to the variations of pressure between one band and another, to the way a pale boundary never quite separates, to the difference between an isolated white and a concentrated green. I do not need these forms to become signs of something outside the painting in order for them to alter the entire territory. The white rectangle shifts the weight of the upper region because it makes visible how much thickness there is in the darkness; the green changes the lower area because it introduces a chromatic reserve within a more closed zone. In working, I try not to compel these presences to declare a single meaning. I prefer them to retain their condition of appearance: something delimited but unexplained; something that asserts itself without conquering the whole field. For me, listening means accepting this economy and allowing the image’s silence to have texture, temperature and duration.

Thus, abandonment, warmth and listening cease to name three separate directions. Abandonment becomes the suspension of a will to possess the visual territory, the acceptance that its strata need not make a complete story transparent. Warmth is no longer shelter or sentimental intensity: it is the condition by which buried layers continue to affect the surface, by which a pink edge vibrates against a grey, an ochre retains its pressure beneath a veil, and darkness cannot entirely erase what it covers. Listening, in turn, does not seek a hidden message, but a form of attention able to register these remnants without subjecting them to a fixed interpretation. QUIES remains between fields that brush against and separate from one another, between one material that holds and another that allows itself to appear. Within this reserve, the small rectangles do not resolve the space: they keep it open with minimal precision, as though the painting had found its particular way of remaining in containment rather than revelation.

Context references

QUIES Maurizio Valch · Maurizio Valch STRATA abstract painting · vertical abstract painting with strata · abstract art with incised lines · material painting in earth and green tones · contemporary abstract artwork in a museum · vertical painting displayed alongside contemporary artworks · abstract art for a contemporary collection

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.