INTERVALLUM

Conceptual Note

INTERVALLUM concentrates one of LIMINA’s central questions: how to inhabit an organised space without allowing that organisation to fix a direction. Maurizio Valch arranges horizontal fields of crimson, darkness, yellow and green as levels that might separate times, heights or zones of passage. Yet seepage and small displaced elements prevent the painting from becoming a diagram. The interval of the title does not denote a passive void, but a sustained zone between divisions that have not yet fully closed.

The work proposes an incomplete orientation. In the broad, almost exposed yellow band, an earth-coloured circle remains isolated to the right, while a minimal group of coloured squares gathers near the lower left edge. Above, other red rectangles seem to remain suspended, offering neither access nor explanation. No narrative is established between them; a distance opens up. The small incised stairs in the lower area suggest communication, but their fragile tracing guarantees neither arrival, ascent nor exit.

A specific affinity with Paul Klee may be recognised in the use of small geometric units as signs of scale and active presences within a larger field. In Valch, however, these forms lack playful lightness: they carry weight through their isolation and the spatial uncertainty they introduce. The eroded surface also brings the work close to Antoni Tàpies’s material concerns, although here the wear retains an explicit territorial organisation, divided into bands and thresholds.

What is visible sustains this instability: the upper red is worked through glazes and dragged passages; the dark band receives vertical drips that cut through the apparent firmness of its boundaries; the yellow extends in irregular brushstrokes, more open and breathable. Below, a brown layer retains marks, drips and incised lines resembling routes barely begun. The final green acts as an edge, yet the incisions continue even there, as though the boundary could not fully close off the space.

I am interested in how a structure can hold without becoming an answer. I work with levels, small presences and routes that might organise the territory, but I allow matter to pass through them and make them uncertain. I do not seek for the stairs to lead to an idea of progress. It is enough that they indicate a possible relation between two places, even if we do not yet know whether it can be traversed.