ASCENSUS

Conceptual Note

The green expanse of ASCENSUS places the viewer before a rigorous diagram of levels that redefines the idea of transit within the LIMINA series. Maurizio Valch dispenses here with linear references to the ladder to explore how the pure distribution of weight in the spatial plane can suggest a transition or a change of state. The painting does not describe a traversable path; it organizes a structure of presences where matter seems to submit to an internal law of gravity, pointing to an imminent passage between what remains anchored and what attempts to rise.

The work opens a question about the nature of effort and isolation through its marked horizontal division. By placing a dark block in the lower margin and a large crimson monolith suspended over a central line of suture, the composition presents an insurmountable distance that must be experienced before being understood geometrically. The tension is not resolved in a fluid ascension, but in the resistance that each block exerts on its own level, suggesting that all formal transformation or transformation of consciousness first requires sustaining oneself in the exposure of the intermediate void.

This economy of elements and the importance granted to unoccupied space reveal a close affinity with the concept of interval in the music of Arvo Pärt, where the silence between two notes sustains the tension of the entire structure. However, unlike musical immateriality, Valch anchors this search in a brutalist and physical dimension closer to Antoni Tàpies; the large green field is not a neutral background, but a silent wall confronting the textured density of the red and black forms, forcing the gaze to measure the scale of its own displacement.

In the visual reading, the olive green color plane, sober and contained, acts as an active void surrounding the cores of matter. The central monolith of a thick and vibrant crimson rests on a horizontal seam of dark scrapings, flanked by two minor blocks that accentuate the frontality of the scene. At the base, the vertical black and indigo block functions as a visual counterweight, a dense presence stabilizing the composition from below, its rough surface retaining the trace of the spatula and the pressure of the pigment.

I look for the exact point where a form ceases to be a simple plane and begins to occupy a place in my own memory. In painting this great green field and dividing it with a line that is at once limit and wound, I do not intend to trace a traversable path, but to measure the distance separating my certainties from that which has not yet taken shape. The dark block below and the red mass suspended above are not symbols of a goal; they are the coordinates of a silent tension with which I live daily in the studio, a structure reminding me that any attempt at elevation first requires accepting the weight of the matter that sustains us.