Nature Portrayed, Nature in Formation. A Few Words About Claudio Valerio One could say that literature is Orpheus returning from the underworld; as long as literature walks forward, aware of guiding someone—the reality behind it gradually being led out of the unnamed—that reality breathes, walks, lives, moving toward the light of meaning. But when literature turns to look at what it loves, all that remains is a named meaning, a dead meaning. *Roland Barthes, Literature and Signification* There is, undoubtedly, a bond that ties images and words together—a connection that fuses a visual fact with a verbal elaboration, generating an overarching structure that fulfills the primary need to produce discourse about the artwork, extracting from the silence of a mute form a shared and communicable body of knowledge. Yet, that bond does not obey the logic of osmosis or the mechanisms of precise transcription between one code and another. This happens, fundamentally, because of the non-linguistic nature of images. Too often treated as actual texts by the delusions of semiotic omnipotence and the pseudo-scientific illusions of those who—insisting on finding a code at all costs—believed they held the objective answer to the abuses of power and the irreducible subjectivity of interpretation, images have always retained an excess of mystery, a measure of enigma. And it is precisely due to their reluctance that they continue, and will continue, to surprise, disorient, and captivate us, engaging our gaze and simultaneously stimulating thoughts and reflections of every kind. Acknowledging the impotence of language, the critic is left with the somber path of reticence—a sentence of condemnation, an abolition of a specific role and function to which I cannot bring myself to acquiesce. But is a different approach possible? Can one inhabit the dead end, the "path-without-path" that opens onto the abyss of the secret, while renouncing both the extremism of pseudo-reason and the perilous mystic drift? As a critic, I have the task of defining the scope of my inquiry, framing the questions to pose to the image, and skirting that abyss. Figuratively speaking, every hypothesis I propose is subordinate to an awareness of the limits and the acknowledgment of the self-referentiality of the inquiry. Every critic, when speaking, speaks only of themselves. Thus, the duty of caution, of preliminary warning, is a prerequisite for any analysis. Images, I remind myself, do not ask to be translated; their essential core lies protected, shielded from any theoretical conceptualization or impromptu deciphering. Therefore, I will not attempt to explain Claudio Valerio’s works, nor will I venture poetic paraphrases in the name of evoking certain atmospheres or entirely personal emotional stirrings that are not conducive to dialogue. Claudio Valerio’s paintings demand respect, urging words to retreat and maintain a safe distance. However, even within the unbridgeable gap, a margin of maneuver remains: clarifying the painter’s process, examining the emerging forms, and conducting a critical reading that, arbitrary as it may be, seeks nonetheless to make its interpretive criteria visible. First, it is essential to specify the artist's modus operandi: on a traditional canvas, Valerio applies an initial layer of charcoal and natural resin—a blend of dark matter that hosts successive oil layers. For the artist, the black dust of charcoal is both a symptom and a symbol of a "dowsing" search for images and forms that take shape out of indistinct darkness. “I usually work in the morning,” he said in an interview, “when the mind has not yet been troubled by the annoyances of the day and is imbued with that rêverie state between sleep and wakefulness.” The profiles, the hints of spatial construction emerging from the foundational layer, embody a liminal condition, a threshold state where it is difficult to pinpoint a precise temporality. When faced with Claudio Valerio’s paintings, one might wonder whether they are abstractions—quintessential distillations stripped of all particularity in favor of synthesis—or embryos of a figuration about to manifest in the optical precision of description. Has the artist already stepped into his Danish gardens, or is he still opening his eyes? Has he dipped his feet into the marsh, or does he intend to? Is the garden real—allowing for its harvest—or is it merely a memory? Is Claudio Valerio’s nature one that is portrayed—therefore retreating, withdrawing from the viewer’s rational assimilation—or, conversely, an entity that remains still, shapeless, and in formation, awaiting an interlocutor? The artist himself seems to pay little heed to such considerations. The recognition of a familiar situation is entirely secondary; what matters for Claudio is the internal configuration of the painting, the geographical arrangement of pictorial marks, and the elements contributing to the overall outcome. The presence of a collection of essays by Clement Greenberg on the bookshelves in his studio is far from coincidental. Since my first encounter with Claudio, I have been unable to avoid recalling the ideas of this American formalism advocate—in *Modernist Painting* (1961), Greenberg dismissed the Latin motto *ars est celare artem* (“art lies in concealing art”), identifying in Manet's work the first case of blatant exhibition of the medium-specific features of painting (“the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment”). Similarly, Maurice Denis’s proto-formalist commentary from 1890 reminds us that “a painting—before it is a battle horse, a nude woman, or any anecdotal depiction—is first and foremost a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order.” Before the gardens—this seems to be Valerio’s message—before the nests and shortcuts, there is the choice of forms and the colors that fill them. No denotative device can perfectly justify a distracted or approximate vision. While words may keep their distance, the gaze cannot afford any naivety. A conscious vision—and this marks the value of Claudio Valerio’s proposition—must not settle for a panoptic viewpoint, deluded that the artist’s prompts (such as the title) can exhaust an aesthetic experience. Instead, it must become a gaze of proximity, penetrating the flesh of the work to examine its body, textures, and internal deceptions. Valerio’s pictorial inquiry hinges on an aporia, a paradoxical contract between fullness and emptiness. The external layer assumes the role of excavating depth and creating perspectival illusions, while the underpainting carries the weight of protrusion and foreground. Training the gaze, cultivating its foundations with sobriety, and practicing an economy of means: in this era of uncontrolled visual proliferation, this is the (aesthetic and ethical) lesson of Claudio Valerio.