Secret meeting by Davide Querin
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 100 x 100 cm
Year: 2012
Status: available
An enigmatic encounter unfolds in a timeless world where reality and imagination converge. Two figures, connected by an unspoken history, inhabit a moment suspended between presence and absence, familiarity and mystery. Their relationship remains deliberately unresolved. What binds them together? A shared past, an intimate connection, or a secret that can never be fully revealed? The painting offers no definitive answers, allowing each viewer to enter the scene and construct a narrative of their own. At the heart of the composition, a passageway suggests the possibility of crossing from one world into another. This subtle tension between separation and connection gives the scene its distinctive psychological depth, transforming an apparently simple encounter into an open-ended meditation on memory, identity, and human relationships. Presented in a solo exhibition at the Museo di San Francesco in Trevi, Umbria, Incontro segreto reflects Davide Querin’s exploration of the ambiguous boundaries between the visible world and the realities we construct through perception and memory. A compelling work for collectors drawn to figurative painting with a strong narrative dimension, the painting rewards sustained attention and invites personal interpretation, revealing new nuances each time it is encountered.
Why collect this work?
The painting divides a square scene into three vertical zones, yet carries its checkerboard floor across them, making separation and connection coexist within one constructed encounter.
- Querin describes his practice as joining remembered, imagined and perceptual spaces. Here that aim is legible in the collision of interior architecture, an empty street and figures who do not clearly acknowledge one another.
- The photograph shows a standing man at left, a seated woman at right and a second man turned away behind her. The central arch and solitary streetlamp become a visual interval, withholding any definitive relationship among them.
- Catalogued as oil on canvas, 100 × 100 cm, the work uses sharp tonal contrasts alongside softer modelling. The artist reports using glazes; such layering may support the pale, partially translucent transitions visible in the figures and architecture, though the photograph cannot confirm surface texture.
- As a study in narrative construction, the painting is especially relevant beside works that use partitions, thresholds or diverted gazes to make social relations uncertain rather than simply depict an event.
About the Artist
Davide Querin
Davide Querin is an artist on Mondoir Studio. Artistic discipline: painting. Based in Rome, IT.
Nationality: Italian
My work explores interior, subtle, and distant worlds—spaces that cannot be described literally, but instead reveal themselves through perception,...
