Maurizio Valch Abstract Painting / Territory and Thought
SOL DIVISUS, a horizontal abstract painting by Maurizio Valch with a vertical red band, orange, ochre, and blue planes, small red blocks, and an ochre solar disc.
Maurizio Valch, SOL DIVISUS, MARE SOMNIORUM series, 120 × 80 × 3 cm.
A visitor views SOL DIVISUS frontally in a museum gallery with light-coloured walls.
SOL DIVISUS in a museum gallery, shown at scale with a visitor.
Framed SOL DIVISUS on a concrete wall in an industrial-style office with large windows.
SOL DIVISUS in an industrial-style office setting.
Angled view of SOL DIVISUS on a dark gallery wall with focused lighting.
SOL DIVISUS in a dark-walled gallery.
SOL DIVISUS hung above a dining table in an industrial interior with concrete and brick.
SOL DIVISUS in an industrial-style dining room.
SOL DIVISUS leaning against a white wall in a studio with large windows.
SOL DIVISUS leaning in a workspace.
SOL DIVISUS hung on a terracotta wall in a gallery with rooms in contrasting colours.
SOL DIVISUS on a terracotta gallery wall.
A visitor views SOL DIVISUS on a light gallery wall alongside other paintings on display.
SOL DIVISUS in a gallery, shown to scale with a visitor.
Side view of SOL DIVISUS in a contemporary gallery with light-coloured walls and other works in the background.
SOL DIVISUS in a contemporary gallery.
SOL DIVISUS installed on a light wall in an exhibition space with warm lighting.
SOL DIVISUS in an exhibition space.
SOL DIVISUS framed above a concrete pillar in a spacious contemporary office.
SOL DIVISUS in an open-plan office.
SOL DIVISUS on a white wall in a two-storey industrial loft with metal stairs.
SOL DIVISUS in a double-height industrial loft.
A person looks at SOL DIVISUS, framed on a concrete wall in an industrial office.
SOL DIVISUS shown to scale in an industrial office.
SOL DIVISUS hung on the wall of a spacious industrial dining room with a long table and orange chairs.
SOL DIVISUS in a spacious dining room with natural light.

Published work / MARE SOMNIORUM

SOL DIVISUS

Divided territories under a shared light

Size
47.2 × 31.5 in / 120 × 80 cm
Series
MARE SOMNIORUM Painting series MARE SOMNIORUM 2024–Present · 3 works MARE SOMNIORUM transforms Maurizio Valch’s Mediterranean experience into an open pictorial territory, where horizon, silence, and isolated structures retain the intensity of a place without describing it literally. His paintings sustain a distance between what has been lived and what has been imagined, between movement and stillness. View series
Context studies
14

Conceptual Note

A dark, reddish vertical band divides the canvas without fully separating its two atmospheres. On the left, the ground folds through oranges, greens, and ochres beneath a pink sky; on the right, the expanse opens into planes of pale light, blue, and yellow beneath a dense solar disc. SOL DIVISUS belongs to the dreamlike territory of MARE SOMNIORUM, yet its title introduces a decisive division: not two landscapes, but two ways of perceiving distance. The painting allows both to remain close and, at the same time, irreducible.

The division does not operate as a resolved boundary. The eye moves from a more inclined area, populated by small blocks and an oblique slab-like form, to another in which the surfaces become broad and almost empty. Yet the same red reappears on both sides: as a low volume, as a small cube on the horizon, as minimal architecture at the lower edge. This recurrence prevents either half from being read as a closed world. What is separated retains a relation; luminosity does not cancel the strangeness of what remains on the other side.

A specific affinity with Richard Diebenkorn can be found in the way abstract planes retain a memory of ground, horizon, and passage. Valch nevertheless departs from an exclusively landscape-based organisation: his fields are more frontal, and the isolated blocks interrupt any naturalistic reading. The ochre disc, too, avoids becoming a fixed emblem. Its suspended weight orders the gaze, but does not explain the place.

The materiality reveals layers, glazes, and variations in brushwork that prevent the fields from closing into flat surfaces. A dark line undulates across the orange on the left; on the right, a large diagonal plane advances from the horizon and unsettles the horizontal calm. Between the vivid red of the lower register, the almost watery clarity of the sky, and the opaque sun, the composition sustains a simple, persistent question: what happens when the same light reaches territories that can no longer be seen from a single side.