QUIES by Maurizio Valch | Abstract Painting from the STRATA Series

QUIES does not meet the eye with a stable image: it places it before a dark, dense height, extending almost like a pressure. Before moving downward, it is worth staying there. Do not look for anything within that area; let it weigh. The upper band does not fully open, but neither does it close: its nuances make the eye want to move closer and, at the same time, draw back.

As you look at that darkness, notice whether your shoulders lift slightly. There is no need to correct them. That small rise already belongs to the painting. The question begins as one of distribution: what kind of stillness needs so many lines to keep from falling? It would seem that the large upper mass supports everything else. But a light, thin, nervous line runs beneath it and defies that impression. It is not a clean edge. It trembles, breaks off, then insists again. A line that cannot manage to be straight, however earnestly it tries, with an almost domestic seriousness.

Mark Rothko. He was a painter who turned fields of colour and uncertain edges into emotional experiences of proximity, silence and gravity.

Here, his large fields might call for a slow, close gaze, a breathing relationship with the distance from one band to the next. The dark area above, the muted earth and green tones below it, the pale band lower down: each expanse seems to wait for the body to pause before it, as though it were not to be crossed but inhabited in its thickness. Yet the fine lines disrupt that calm. They do not allow a surface simply to be a surface. They brush against it like a poorly concealed seam, like a coastline refusing to establish which side belongs to water and which to land, like an electrical boundary that remains live although no one knows what it separates.

In the upper right appears the small light rectangle. It is little, almost insufficient, and precisely for that reason it alters the entire dark band. Without it, the darkness could extend with a silent authority. With it, it begins to seem watched from within. The light block does not illuminate: it interrupts. It explains nothing. It remains there with the uncomfortable firmness of something that should not move and yet seems about to slide downward.

A child might ask: is the little white square hiding, or is it looking?

The question does not need an answer. It is enough that it makes the height waver.

The lines are no longer contours. They have stopped serving the bands and begun to argue with them. Some seem to stitch two areas together; others separate them with an overly visible obstinacy. Where the eye expected to rest on the earth tone or muted green, a pink edge appears, a pale vibration, an irregularity that returns the gaze to its own imbalance.

I do not find a calm obedience in these lines. I feel the surface resisting whenever a band seems to want to remain in place, as though another pressure beneath it did not fully accept that boundary. At times a band begins by asking for repose and ends by demanding distance; then I hesitate whether to follow it or let it come undone before my eyes. I do not need the line to describe a thing: it is enough that it calls into question where what lies beside it begins and where it ceases to hold.

Now move down, though not as someone descending steps. Move down while losing a little support. The middle expanses—veiled earth, muted green, grey, barely lit pink—create a kind of provisional ground. They seem to organise the height: above, weight; in the middle, extension; below, reception. Yet the pink line running through one of those bands shifts everything once more. The band no longer rests; it seems to contain a vibration that never quite becomes movement.

Rudolf Laban. He was an artist and movement researcher who imagined ways of reading the body in space: its directions, weights and tensions.

With this attention, the painting begins to distribute loads. The gaze falls from the upper part, slows in the middle bands, leans towards the pale strip, lingers before the dark green rectangle. Some areas seem to bear more weight than others; others seem barely to support it, like an open hand already registering fatigue. The eye does not move freely: it advances, pauses, corrects itself. Breathing may grow shorter as it descends towards the green, not for the sake of drama, but because that block seems caught within a brightness that does not entirely make room for it.

And yet this reading of weight is not enough either. The body can recognise tensions, heights, efforts and directions; it can sense which band appears to support another. But there is an immobility here that cannot be translated into gesture. It is not repose. It is not passivity. It weighs more heavily than the movement one might imagine. As though the painting had immobilised not a body, but the need for a body to choose where to go.

Here the conflict appears. The gaze that sought proximity and silence suspects that the analysis of weights wants to order the scene too soon. The gaze that perceives support and imbalance suspects, in turn, that contemplation of the fields wants to turn tension into atmosphere. Neither can tame QUIES. The bands are not merely silent presences; they are demarcated, taut, almost watched over by their own lines. And the lines are not merely trajectories of movement: they persist because something does not move.

The question has changed. It is no longer concerned only with how the work is composed. It asks what a body does when it needs to mark an edge because it does not know where it is. It asks how much air is needed between one band and another so that neither entirely invades its neighbour. It asks whether stillness is the absence of falling or the endless labour of preventing it.

I look again at the finished painting and cannot find the rectangles where I thought I had left them. The light area above has moved away from me: it no longer seems small, because it alters an expanse too large for it. The green below likewise refuses to remain contained; the more fixed it appears, the more it makes the pale band around it uncertain. I see a stillness that persists without offering itself as rest, and I do not know whether that persistence belongs to the forms or to the gaze that returns to them.

The green rectangle remains within the light band, yet does not settle into it. The band seems to hold it and, at the same time, leave it exposed. From above, the white rectangle responds differently: it is not held back, but suspended in an area that should absorb it. There is no declared relationship between the two. One interrupts the darkness; the other densifies the paleness. One seems to direct attention upward; the other compels the gaze downward, where the ground becomes uncertain again.

For that reason, the movement rises once more. Not to find an explanation in the dark area, but to notice that the first mass is no longer the same. The lower lines have risen with the gaze. The green has left a pressure in the body. The white, so small, has made the upper part more vulnerable. Everything that seemed horizontal has acquired a slight inward inclination.

What kind of stillness needs so many lines to keep from falling: perhaps a stillness that does not want to become absolute silence; perhaps one that needs to brush against, separate, correct and mark again. The fine line crossing a band never finally decides whether to join it or divide it. It remains there, with its pale tremor, trying to keep apart two territories that may never have been truly separate.

Context references

QUIES Maurizio Valch · contemporary vertical abstract painting · abstract art with incised lines · material painting with colour fields · dark earthy abstract painting · abstract gallery wall art · 80 x 120 cm abstract painting · STRATA series 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.