Through her “slow paintings,” Valentina Maggiolo invites viewers to engage with the temporality of existence, prompting meditative reflection on the transient and enduring aspects of life—much like eyes adjusting to the dark before seeing a ghost.
Valentina Maggiolo’s work navigates the intricate interplay between the natural and the supernatural, crafting landscapes that hover between the familiar and the uncanny. Using a muted yet evocative color palette, her works delve into themes of temporality and permanence, exploring the haunting remnants of time through the lens of ruins, the desert, and sundials. These elements enhance the contrast between light and shadow, invoking a sense of timelessness and slow contemplation. Her pieces scale the infinite against the intimate, inviting reflection on responsibility and care for the environment.
Incorporating elements such as fire, rock formations, dried-up vegetation, snakeskins, bones, and even references to UFOs, Maggiolo’s work bridges natural history with the metaphysical. Through slower techniques such as oil painting, frescoes, ceramics, and the insertion of site-specific sculptures in the Peruvian desert, her images brew and overlay with time. This allows a tactile materiality to be portrayed through washes, while more spectral qualities lend themselves to her sculptural proposals. Through her “slow paintings,” she invites viewers to engage with the temporality of existence, prompting meditative reflection on the transient and enduring aspects of life—much like eyes adjusting to the dark before seeing a ghost.