Work sheet
Technical data
year | 2023 |
purchase date | acquired in the portfolio |
estimated current value in € | consult the updated Price Table |
identification of the subject | abstract painting/reconstructivist work |
materials and techniques | oil on canvas/mixed media/material work |
measurements in centimeters cm | 80 x 60 x 1,8 |
inscriptions | signature |
inscription technique | oil |
inscription position | on the back/bottom/right |
transcription | Valvo |
authenticity certificate | issued at the same time as the sale |
art multiples | no print issued |
state of conservation | intact work |
location of the work | Rome · Italy |
copyright | © all rights reserved · global · S.I.A.E. |
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Description of work
The Horn of Africa
Famine, drought, the after-effects of European colonization, internal clashes, the Somali-Ethiopian war, political instability. Legions of humans struggling to survive every single day.
It is precisely in the denunciation of the state of things, in the dryness and aridity of an almost infertile land without water, in the struggle to survive and in the escape from blind violence that this canvas finds its apodictic meaning.
The work has a concentric structure and is characterized by a generally lucid and cold vision. The restless observation of the present.
The pictorial morphology of this work is twofold: three-dimensional on the one hand, aerial and exquisitely two-dimensional on the other.
In agreement with the first of the two interpretations, that is the three-dimensional one, we note how the work, in the central part, literally tends to sink inwards. To collapse on itself. The abyss. A perspective tunnel in which everything is absorbed, without exceptions whatsoever. A black hole that sucks everything around it. An endless well. A ravine. Total emptiness. The unknown.
The structural elements, that is graphic symbols, circles, quadratures, lines tangled on themselves, stylized or otherwise serpent-like images, present promiscuously in the peripheral area of the canvas, gradually lose grip, detaching themselves from their reference plane and catapulting themselves towards oblivion. Even the sand-colored material encrustation, present in the right half of the work, seems to be affected by this irrefutable attraction, magnetically sucked towards nothingness.
At the same time the painting presents a strictly reconstructivist and, therefore, two-dimensional connotation, according to which we perceive the pictorial plane as a flat surface observed from a perspective that we could define as aerial. Warm tones loom all around, surrounding the central element with a deconstructed appearance: it seems like observing the dehydrated carcass of a decomposed bovine in the middle of the desert.
Diagonal and thin lines, in black, emphasize, in strong contrast with the underlying shades and by means of a pronounced obliquity, the concentric directionality of the structure.
Our eye, in both cases, is always led to contextualise the work in real time, at the first visual impact, and then slide towards the central point, sloping towards the exact intersection of the diagonals of the canvas.
The work has an autobiographical character, relating to the author’s past period of stay in the regions of central Africa, in the last decade of the twentieth century. The artist treasured these experiences and all these visions and perceptions, elaborating them for a long time and re-proposing them, now mature, decades later.
This painting has an underlying drama. It’s undeniable. At the same time, it expresses the desert as a subject in a simple and direct way, a theme very dear to Valvo.
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