INTO THE VALLEY: Osvaldo Mariscotti’s Recent Paintings
Entering the Valley
At first glance, the twelve paintings that comprise Osvaldo Mariscotti’s ‘Valley’ series (2024–2025) seem like a departure from the hard edged geometry and graphic clarity that have characterized his work of recent years. Though some obvious features remain, chief among them the artist’s characteristic bold, metallic-infused color palette, these new paintings feature jagged lines, visible paint handling, and, most conspicuously, totemic vertical forms that span the height of the canvas. As you continue to look at the‘Valley’ paintings, their abstract elements give way to indications of landscape.
Despite their very different appearance, the ‘Valley’ series continues and deepens the interest in nature Mariscotti expressed in his earlier, rigorously geometric ‘Seasons’ paintings. In Four Seasons II (2023), he used color chords and harmonies, rendered in hard edged horizontal bands, to suggest the characteristic light and climate of each season. Each of the four panels that comprise the painting features a few thin vertical lines that scale the expansive bands, creating a visual rhythm that guides the eye through the work. In the ‘Valley’ series, Mariscotti continued to explore the interplay between horizontal stripes and vertical figures, while also using colored bands as a vehicle for the ambience of light and atmosphere.
Take, for example, the first work from the series. In The Valley I (2024), the rectangular offshoots of the central vertical form suggest the branches of a tree, while the yellow near-circle to the right of tree reads as the sun. With landscape in mind, the ridges along the bottom edge, which interrupt the regularity of the picture’s horizontal bands, allude to hills farther away in the landscape. The relative legibility of these elements enables the viewer to recognize their appearance in subsequent works, as in The Valley II (2024), where the sun, located in the same place, has been transformed into a multicolored half circle, or The Valley VIII (2025), where it hovers in the background, flanked by a pair of trees. These elements – a tree, the sun, and the suggestion of a hill or valley – set the stage for the ‘Valley’ paintings, with all of them reoccurring in each work in the series, shifting back and forth between discernibility and abstraction.
Personal Sources & Historical Parallels
In conversation, Mariscotti identifies two earlier precedents in his own work as inspirations for the ‘Valley’ series. First, as a child he enjoyed exploring nearby forests in Bariloche, Argentina, a city at the foothills of the Patagonian Andes, which in his teenage years, became a subject for his art. Working in oil, he completed a number of impressionistically rendered forest interiors in deep browns and greens. (‘Colors I don’t like anymore,’ Mariscotti remarks.*) More recently, reflecting on those adolescent paintings, he considered the time that had passed. ‘I thought I could paint something like a revival, like the way I see the trees now. It’s very nostalgic,’ he explains. Working on the ‘Valley’ pictures reconnected Mariscotti with his younger self. ‘When I paint them, I feel very young, like when I was 14,’ he muses. ‘And I look at my old trees and then I say, well, I’ve learned a lot because now I couldn’t paint like this again.’ Mariscotti recalls another artwork from his past, a naturalistic abstraction he completed in the 1980s entitled Storm in the Valley. This painting’s composition, with its towering tree, rolling hills, and energetic winds, directly prefigures the common qualities of his subsequent ‘Valley’ pictures.
Though Mariscotti focuses on personal childhood memories and his own previous work as the primary sources for the ‘Valley’ series, the works are not entirely insular. Their expressive power is deepened through their parallels with the art of the past, particularly the work of Wassily Kandinsky, one of the earliest pioneers of abstraction. While still painting representationally, Kandinsky shifted away from naturalistic color around 1907–08 and began working with autonomous, expressive color. His liberation of color from its descriptive function swiftly gave way to a similar uncoupling of line from form. The paintings in Mariscotti’s ‘Valley’ series follow in this vein, particularly with regard to their prismatic backgrounds, comprised of jagged, interlocking lines that suggest the sky and, with their constantly shifting motion, the wind. The rushing wind is central to Mariscotti’s conception for the series. ‘You feel like something is moving,’ he explains. ‘I always paint objects moving, moving in different positions, because what I care about is time. That’s the only way that you can see things, through time, and in the passing of time.’
The themes of spatial movement, the passage of time, and cycles of life have preoccupied Mariscotti throughout his work of recent years, but they assume a new resonance, urgency, and accessibility in the ‘Valley’ paintings owing to his use of symbolic imagery. Like Kandinsky, Mariscotti recognizes the importance of allusive imagery. ‘Although Kandinsky believed that color could have the same emotional intensity as music. . . and that line could suggest dancelike motion,’ art historian Rose-Carol Washton Long observes, ‘he maintained that color and line alone could not be the basis for the development of an abstract style. . . artists as well as spectators needed reference points from the external world.’* Take, for example, the owl perched on a tree branch in The Valley VII (The Blue Rider) (2025), whose parenthetical title is derived from the artist group and almanac spearheaded by Kandinsky during the years (1911–13) of his earliest abstractions, or the cleanly circular sun in The Valley XI (2025) – these elements signal to the viewer Mariscotti’s representational aims.
Onward from the Valley
Mariscotti’s use of symbolic and loosely representational imagery primes the viewer for the increasing abstraction of the later paintings in the series, as the relatively organically rendered trees and smaller shrubs in The Valley II and III (both 2024) give way to stacks of hard edged rectangles in The Valley VIII and XI (both 2025). Bearing a passing resemblance to abstract expressionist artist David Smith’s mid-1960s ‘Cubi’ sculptures, these later ‘Valley’ works hint at Mariscotti’s own sculptural practice. For many years, he has translated certain of his paintings into sculpture, turning lines into planks and planes into volumes. Mariscotti’s ability to conceive of colors and forms across dimensions and through different media is a unique aspect of his practice, and reflects the structural and spatial thinking shaped by his earlier engineering career.
As he has continued working on ‘Valley’ paintings, Mariscotti commenced a new series of geometric works in which he explores shifting color relationships and modes of symmetry and asymmetry. In each of his ‘Synergy III’ paintings (all 2025), a thin black stripe bisects the canvas with sequences of evenly spaced bands – yellow, orange, green, pink, and purple – that mirroring each other at the edges of the canvas. The rhythmic progression and spatial configuration of this five color sequence varies dramatically throughout the series, with each painting unfolding upon a boldly colored ground – light green, cerulean, scarlet, and so on. By contrast asymmetry and variety prevails in his recent series of untitled rectangles. Though Untitled (CGoPB) and Untitled (BGoLG) (both 2025) share an identical organization and similar sets of hues, the colors in the former painting, arrayed against a black ground, are higher keyed and resemble day-glo paints. In the latter painting, with its metallic silver ground, those hues are deeper and more opaque.
The ‘Valley’ paintings mark a momentous development in Mariscotti’s practice – one that brings together memory, movement, and material exploration in a space that is as metaphorical as it is visual. The valley, in these paintings, is not only a setting or motif, it is also an imaginative space where past and present, and representation and abstraction converge. It becomes a structure through which Mariscotti can reckon with the passage of time – both as personal history and as the gradual perception of form. The visual language of the ‘Valley’ works is suffused with motion: trees tremble, wind rushes across jagged skies, and color fractures into rhythmic vibrations. This sense of temporal flux extends across his broader artistic practice. Rather than signaling a break, the ‘Valley’ series announces new trajectories. At this moment Mariscotti’s work does not resolve into a single direction. It instead reveals a practice in motion, grounded in memory and propelled by an ongoing sense of discovery.
